


Kaijitsu

by JackBivouac



Series: Rise of the Runelords [7]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work, Pathfinder (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Altar Sex, Bestiality, Bird/Human Hybrids, Bondage, Demon Sex, Dogs, Double Penetration, Drugged Sex, F/F, F/M, Gang Rape, Giant Spiders, Goats, Goblins, Humiliation, Impregnation, Knotting, Lizards, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Magical Pregnancy, Master/Slave, Multi, Necrophilia, Other, Oviposition, Porn With Plot, Rape, Sexual Slavery, Tentacle Monsters, Trees, Unconscious Sex, Underwater Sex, Were-Creatures, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2020-11-01 06:44:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 39
Words: 47,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20810798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackBivouac/pseuds/JackBivouac
Summary: Oneshots from Rise of the Runelords AND Reign of Winter as an explicit campaign.All my dice rolls here, but theoretically if there were players, this wouldn't be non-con  but prearranged fantasy scenarios based on how they wanted to handle losses to the enemy or successful seduction attempts





	1. A Sleepy Town Wakes...Rude!

The coastal town of Sandpoint had faced few trials and dangers over the course of its forty-two year history, but that was all about to change. Unbeknownst to the town’s founders, they built their frontier community over the ruins of an ancient laboratory and prison. These were the Catacombs of Wrath, a place where arcanists of ancient Thassilon explored and perfected the stolen arts of lifeshaping and fleshwarping. When their empire collapsed, the catacombs went dormant. They were not fated to stay that way.

It was the first day of autumn, but more than that, it was the day of consecration for the new cathedral of Desna. The young Kaijitsu twins might've worshipped her as the Goddess of the North Star, but they watched as rapt as the next villager as Father Zantus and his acolytes wheeled a large covered wagon into the square.

First came the tale. Shizu and Shinya had heard it plenty of times over the years. When Desna first fell to the earth, she was nursed back to health by a blind child. In gratitude for their aid, she’d transformed the child into an immortal butterfly.

The acolytes pulled back the wagon cover. A furious storm of a thousand swallowtail butterflies swarmed into the air in a spiraling riot of purples, yellows, and blues. The twins, swept up in the fantastic rush, cheered with the crowd, a small but cosmopolitan bunch.

The two Tian-Min in their well-worn leather dusters would’ve stood out no more than the next varied and sundry ethnicity save that both Shizu and Shinya each possessed one solid, dead black eye. Many supposed that they, like their ill-fated friend Nula, gods rest her soul, were aasimar. Only their philandering father knew the truth.

As the children ran off to chase the butterflies, never quite quick enough to catch them, those in the know stuck around for the free lunch, at the expense of the local taverns. It was a marketing push, of course, with the Rusty Dragon, the Hagfish, and the White Deer each vying to snipe the others’ patrons. Shinya, a loyal customer of the Rusty Dragon, quickly snatched up two tankards of early winterdrop mead and two platters of curry-spiced salmon.

Their older (half-)sister and tavern owner Ameko leaned heavily on the vending stall and gave them a brilliant grin, taking the breath away from every customer in the vicinity. “You finally hit that growth spurt, kiddo? Or does somebody have a date?”

“Hah! I wish,” Shinya laughed without clarifying to which of those possibilities would’ve made for a better reality. “This is for Shizu.”

“Huh, so the lil’ stiff came out to a public party.” She straightened up on her arms to cast a sloe eye over the crowd, but the twins had picked out a luncheon spot too shadowed to draw notice, a laundry-strung alleyway. “Well, lemme know how they like it.”

“They’ll love it!”

"Curry salmon?" Shizu made a face as they chewed but swallowed resolutely. Then scraped the rest of the curry seasoning off with a claw-like black nail.

Shinya sighed and rolled their eyes, their solid black orb seemingly unmoved. They leaned back against the redwood timbers of the loghouse and took a deep swig of the mead. The mead was pleasantly cool, the afternoon sun pleasantly warm, and just the first hint of crisp autumn in the air. But it'd be a snow day in summer before Shizu learned to appreciate the little things like they did.

For now, they closed their eyes and just enjoyed. Until a scream sliced through the air, quickly followed by more of its kind. Shinya and Shizu scrambled to their feet, a family katana in Shinya's hand and a hunter's longbow in Shizu's.

A surge of new voices rose above the clamoring crowd, high-pitched and tittering shrieks. Green blurred low to the ground. A dog yelped in pain and collapsed with a gurgle, its throat cut from ear to ear. The goblin perpetrator licked the blade of their dogslicer clean as its brethren took up a shrill, raucous chant.

Their solid red eyes fixed on the twins. With a screeching warcry, the three-foot hellion threw themself at Shinya, burying their blade deep into their shocked target's side.

"Shinya!" Shizu screamed, fingers fumbling in panic. Their arrow tilted precariously at the bow.

As Shizu hastily reset their hands and arrow, they were forced to watch the goblin stab into Shinya yet again. Their sibling gurgled blood, the katana nearly falling from their limp fingers.

Shizu clenched their teeth, aimed, fired. The arrow, passing a hair’s breadth from Shinya, shunked through the goblin’s solid red eye and into their brain. The goblin went down like any deer or rabbit or wild goat.

Shizu caught Shinya before they went down with them. The two staggered against the alley wall.

“Hold still, hold still.” Shizu’s voice wavered as they bound up Shinya’s bloody side with fabric ribbons cut from their own shirt.

Shinya complied as best they could but the shivering was completely unintentional. They fixed their eyes on the chaos that had engulfed the square. Goblins raced everywhere, singing and slashing indiscriminately. Tongues of flame lashed from the stalls.

“A-Ameko,” Shinya gasped through chattering teeth. They pushed off the wall and away from Shizu.

“Shinya, wait!”

There was no time even for that. Five goblins armed with dogslicers and torches crowded cackling and shrieking at the mouth of the alley.

“Oh, fuck,” breathed the siblings. With one heart and mind, they turned tail and ran.

White hot pain lanced through Shizu’s calf. An arrow. At their speed, they stumbled into Shinya, taking both of them down. Dogslicers plunged into the twins’ backs, the sound of stabbing quickly drowning out their weakening screams.

#*#*#*#*

Shinya woke, cold and aching in every inch of their body. Much to their surprise, they knew exactly where they were.

A long furnace burning with hot blue light rumbled loudly along the entire wall of the equally long room. Marble tables cluttered with tools for working raw glass sat throughout the chamber. This was where their father’s workers melted glass.

Or did. The bodies of the eight staffers littered the floor in various stages of dismemberment, presumably murdered by the goblins shoving each other to roast legs and arms in the furnace. More inscrutably, two of the eight hellions were pouring melted glass on the larger remains.

Shinya broke into a cold sweat. They had to get out of here, which was easier said than done. The goblins had secured their prisoner in a hogtie, their bound wrists lashed to their ankles with a short, sturdy length of rope.

They started small, wriggling their wrists. But it took only a single bored goblin to dash their progress. The hellion jabbed a finger in Shinya’s direction, chirping excitedly.

Shinya froze. The goblins jumped, chittered, and shrieked with wild grins. They swarmed around them, grabbing and tearing at Shinya’s clothes and skin. They dragged Shinya, wincing in pain, across the floor toward the room’s central alcove.

All pain and clamor drained away with the blood in Shinya’s face. Propped up in a chair and encased in thick, runny sheets of hardened glass was Lonjiku Kaijitsu, father of Ameko and the twins. So great was their shock that Shinya never noticed the goblins readying their next, sadistic exultation.

Dogslicers cut Shinya’s pants to shreds. They flipped their captive hard onto their arms, back, and bent legs. Before the twink’s vision ceased to spin, two goblins shoved their green dicks into Shinya’s upside-down mouth. Two more thrust into their virgin asshole.

Doubly penetrated from both ends, Shinya gave a cock-gagged scream of agony, choking as the goblins tore their throat and anal walls apart. A fifth goblin hopped up onto their chest, licking and sucking down on Shinya’s own cock like a thirsty whore.

The intense, wet suck over the dicks ramming Shinya’s ass in the g-spot could only heat and harden their helplessly pleasured cock. The twink whimpered onto the cocks pistoning in their mouth, their overstuffed shafts squeezing tight around their rapists’ dicks.

The four goblins shrieked and dug their claws into Shinya’s trembling flesh. Latched on, they jackhammered like mad into their helpless captive’s throat and anus. Sticky goblin cum exploded into Shinya’s ass and mouth.

They gurgled and swallowed. Cum burst from their own head into the hot, sucking mouth of the goblin milking their dick. Shinya shuddered as every last drop was lapped from their cock.

But the goblins weren’t done. The four pulled out of their new cum toilet’s ass and mouth, leaving room for the four who hadn’t yet blown their loads. Shinya received no rest or respite, the goblins raping them over and over until their cum ran like leaking blood from the twink’s skin and holes.


	2. What Family Isn't Complicated?

Shizu woke cold, aching, and swaying nauseously. They hung by their bound wrists, elbows, knees, and ankles to a pole carried precariously low to the ground. With their solid black eye piercing the darkness, they took in the wetland canopy’s tangle of cypress, eucalyptus, oak, and willow as well as their goblin captors.

The dozens of goblins who’d taken part in the Sandpoint raid had been members of the five different tribes scattered through the hinterlands. The nearest marsh was Brinestump, suggesting that Shizu’s four captors belonged to the Licktoad tribe.

Thankfully, they didn’t have Shinya. On the other hand, Shizu now had no idea what ill fate had befallen their twin. With no hope of escape from their current position, they forced themself to focus on the soggy, mossy wooden bridge ahead to keep from speculating themself into a panic.

Sudden movement from the reeds mercifully(?) caught their undivided attention. Three humanoid crows, blacks eyes glittering in the darkness, leapt out from under the bridge. In place of wings, the dire corbies had two muscular, black-feathered arms ending in claws as hard as rock.

“Oof!”

The goblins dropped Shizu. Shizu used the distraction of bloody, shrieking combat to wriggle their wrists in the bonds of coarse rope, but the corbies made quick, neck-snapping work of the little creatures. One tossed the bodies into a large burlap sack. Another crouched down beside Shizu, freezing them in breathless fear.

The corbie squawked and hefted the front end of the sturdy pole on his shoulder. The third corbie took up the back end. Shizu didn’t bother stifling their despairing whimper as the crows hauled them deeper into the uncharted wetland. They would never be found.

#*#*#*#*

“The goblins took my family!” Ameko screamed at the sheriff and the mayor on stage at the town’s emergency, midnight assembly. She wasn’t alone in screaming or in that particular complaint, but she wasn’t leaving until someone did something about it.

“Oh come now, Ame, don’t make a scene,” cooed a deep and very familiar voice. “I’m sure Shinya will turn up sooner or later.”

The crowd parted half in shock and half in awe of the languid confidence that oozed from the speaker. The jaw-droppingly stunning half-elf stood a few inches taller than the majority human townsfolk. His skin was a dark, burnished bronze and his half-Tian eyes as dark as night. His silken black hair was gathered in a long tail down his back that swayed as he approached his elder half-sister.

Tsuto was born twenty-one years ago to the Kaijitsus, both of whom were human. Clearly, Lonjiku wasn’t the boy’s father, and the noble’s rage at his wife’s indiscretion was the talk of the town for months. As soon as the boy was of schooling age, he was sent to military school in the city of Magnimar where he was ignored by his father and forbidden visits from his mother. Ameko hadn’t seen him since.

She opened her mouth but her tongue fumbled for words. “Ts-uhhp-sh-Shizu was taken too.”

Both eyebrows quirked upward at that. “From what mother wrote, gods rest her soul, I’m surprised the little anti-social tyke was even in attendance.”

“Well. They were. Now they’re both gone.” And Father likely didn’t know nor cared to know. Once he’d sired Ameko’s siblings with gods knew whom and brought them into the manor, he’d considered his revenge on Mother complete and promptly abandoned them to their own devices as well.

Ameko blinked, hard and fast. This was getting her nowhere she wanted to be right now. She snapped back toward the sheriff and mayor, haplessly beset by several others during her lull. “No! You’re helping me! Don’t make me pull the founding family card!”

Before she could storm up on stage with the other petitioners, a finger tapped her shoulder. She wheeled around in a fury. “Tsuto, I swear to--”

Tsuto had vanished from the meeting hall. A full-blooded elf standing a full head taller than the humans had seemingly taken his place, in more ways than one. Their ageless features were a near exact replica of his only sharper, more fey in aspect. Where Tsuto’s eyes were black, theirs were a woodsy brown and the elf’s hair an olive green.

“If your sibling was taken into the swamp, I’ll find them,” the stranger assured her in a low voice barely above a whisper.

“...you’re not Tsuto.”

“No.”

“Who are you?”

“Shalo, goblin-hunter.” The elf turned to leave, revealing a well-used longbow on their back and a string of dried goblin ears at their belt.

Ameko grabbed the edge of their ranging cloak. “I’m coming with you.”

Shalo’s eyes flicked over the tavernkeep. The elf frowned but seemed to realize better than to waste time arguing with her. “What’s your name?”

“Ameko, family savior.”

#*#*#*#*

Shinya’s eyes fluttered open at the furious slam of a boot against wood. The heavy door then slammed into the wall, sending the goblins shrieking and scattering out of the glassworking room.

Tsuto stormed down the stairs and all the way over to the glass-encased corpse of Shinya’s father. “I hope you’re happy you useless crock of sperm.”

He kicked the coffin for good measure.

Shinya wasn’t expecting a response, but a sharp, tinkling laugh like the breaking of glass pierced the heated silence. They watched, upside-down, as a familiar, silver-haired aasimar walked into their line of sight.

Nula, no longer a nervous child but a smiling woman whose left hand had been transformed into a demonic red talon, winked a violet eye at Shinya as she passed. She grabbed the front of Tsuto’s shirt with her right, olive-skinned hand and pulled the half-elf into a deep, tonguing kiss. When they finally broke apart, she caressed his cheek with the back of her talon.

“Lamashtu’s cunt, but how sweet your anger is. Let’s fuck.” The aasimar ripped her shirt open, the skin of her midriff criss-crossed by knotty cords of red scar tissue. From her neck hung a curious silver medallion inscribed with a seven-pointed star.

She threw herself at him, nipples hardening to brown pearls.

Tsuto caught her on his palm, holding his lover out at arm’s length. “No, Nula. I’m not in the mood.”

“Not in the mood?” she scoffed, hand and talon going to her hips. “Did that stop you from siccing your goblins on your own little sibling?”

Half-sibling, the hog-tied, cum-coated Shinya couldn’t help deliriously joking to themself.

“Nula, let it. Fucking. Go.”

“I will not, you gods-damned cunt-tease!” With a deranged, high-pitched roar, the devotee of Lamashtu, Mother of Perversion, renewed her assault with the bared blade of a bastard sword.

Shinya wasn’t quite sure what they were expecting, but Tsuto didn’t hold back in the slightest. Before Nula’s blade could bite, the half-elf landed two blurring, brutal punches between the aasimar’s breasts. But even with shocking his speed, he couldn’t step away clean.

Nula’s bastard sword drew a thick, red line across his arm. Tsuto roared, letting loose a bone-crunching kick to her ribs.

With her eyes and star medallion aglow, the aasimar retaliated, unphased by the blow. Her sword cut deep into her lover’s flesh. She followed a gouge of her talon into his unprotected gut.

Tsuto cried out, spewing blood. He rained a flurry of blows upon Nula’s nose and throat with desperate strength. Cartilage shattered under the heel of his palms.

The aasimar went down face-first, blood pooling under her head. But Tsuto knew better than to think she was dead or that he could kill the Marked of Lamashtu. Instead, he drew a small pocket knife and slashed at Shinya.

His younger sibling’s cum-sodden bonds flumped to the floor. He grabbed Shinya under the arm and hauled them to their feet. “Your affects are in the back room. Get them and get the fuck out of here.”

“Tsu-wha…?”

“Oh, but don’t return to the manor until Nula and her cronies are done with Thistletop. Actually, if you want my advice, you really ought to take this opportunity to wash your hands of Sandpoint entirely.”

With that, Tsuto took his own advice and dashed out from the family glassworks, leaving Shinya free but reeling in the darkness.


	3. Food for the Birds

The dire corbies marched all night. In the misted dawn, they finally emerged from the marsh forest at the base of rocky bluff. Above loomed a large castle of dark gray stone.

Shizu inhaled sharply as they realized just how far the corbies had taken them. A dark castle overlooking the swamp could only be that of the ill-fated Brinewall settlement. Decades ago their grandfather, Rokuro Kaijitsu, had a vested interest in growing the town. He ended up dying with the rest of the villagers when some enemy force swept in under cover of a storm and slaughtered the entire population.

To this day, no one knew who perpetrated the attack or why. In large part because the initial investigative team from Magnimar pronounced the ruins cursed and haunted. As a result, the marsh was allowed to reclaim the land, though it seemed that the dire corbies had issued a rival claim. They were obviously not afraid of no ghosts.

The castle gate creaked open. As soon as the corbies toted Shizu through the Brinewall’s iron-fanged mouth, their skin erupted into such violent prickling it threatened to leap right off their flesh. Shizu knew with crystalline certainty that this was magic.

No wonder the investigators claimed the land cursed, haunted, and good. Shizu could feel the magic like an acid breaking them down at the cellular level only to build them back up but not quite the same. The dire corbies, however, seemed perfectly immune, perhaps thanks to the unholy protection of some evil deity. Corbies were notorious demon worshippers.

The corbies carried Shizu through the castle’s unlit halls to the two-hundred-year-old throne room. Rotting, faded banners hung from the walls depicting a stylized castle sitting on a seaside cliff. At the end of a long line of thick stone pillars was an old wooden throne, its back carved to resemble the towers of a castle wrapped in the coils of a serpentine dragon. On it slouched a Tian man with a bristly goatee, deep red skiing, and a decidedly inhuman beak of a nose.

The yamabushi tengu idly toyed with a kusarigama in his lap. He spared not a glance for the triumphant hunting party, his eyes fixed on the four dire corbies he'd cast in his latest play. They were supposed to be a flock of ravens who'd woken to find themselves trapped in flightless human bodies, but their acting was...raw at best. If he had to suffer it for the better part of an hour, then so did his underlings and their prisoner.

“Alright, alright, take a breather,” Kikonu waved at the actors, who promptly squatted or flopped down to rest. “Now, what have you brought me?”

The first corbie set down his sack and gave it a kick. A goblin corpse already stinking with rot rolled out.

“No matter, nothing a little fire can’t take care of.” Provided someone could keep their brain-dead ogre chef from roasting the meat to ash. “Next!”

The second and third corbies dropped their prisoner on their back. The dirty, travel-worn humanoid in a leather duster rolled onto their side with a grunt.

Kikonu’s raven-black wings flared. He flew up from the throne and landed at the pole-bound prisoner’s side for a better look. He crouched down and brushed the sweaty black tangles out of their face with the sickle tip of their kusarigama.

The oni cackled in delight. Whether the corbies realized it or not, they’d brought him a genuine Tian-Min just like those he used to torment a world away in Minkai. The slight incursion of a monstrous, gray-skinned, mute hag’s blood in them did nothing to dampen Kikonu’s spirits or stiffening erection.

He shoved the prisoner onto their bound forearms and knees over the pole and grabbed their hips. Ignoring their squawk of protest, he yanked down their pants and thrust his bright red cock up their virgin asshole.

Shizu screamed, thrashing helplessly in a world of new pain. One of the corbies seized their shaking shoulders. He squatted down and railed his avian dick down their throat, gagging them to the hilt.

Their cock-muffled sobbing was music to the oni’s ears. With a wild cackle, he thrust harder, deeper into Shizu’s tight, virgin shaft. His cock split their anal walls to the hilt, his head churning their clenched gut to a spasming pulp.

Shizu convulsed between the yamabushi tengu and the corbie, their back arching against Kikonu’s feather-sprouting chest. The oni, spurred on by his victim climaxing uncontrollably, instinctively shifted into his most feral, ravenous form.

He pistoned into their clenching anus with a screechy moan. Seed burst from his cock into their ass. He pulled out to watch himself spurt onto the reddened flesh of their soft asscheeks.

“Awww, what a good little changeling bitch.” He gave the cock-gagged cum toilet a resounding smack on their rounded ass and jerked a nod at the six other corbies fluffing their dicks. “Sloppy seconds, anyone?”

Driven even harder by primal hungers than their master, the dire corbies forced Shizu to endure seconds, thirds, and more until their restrained body was bled of every ounce of its strength. They collapsed unconscious, covered and leaking cum from every hole, their gang raped body a flesh husk for cock...and the fell magics of Brinewall.


	4. Into the Unknown

"Sheriff, I have reason to believe Thistletop is connected to the goblin attack," said Shinya. They'd spent the night in the alley outside the sheriff's office just to make sure they'd be the first in line to speak with the beleaguered Shoanti. A good thing too, as quite a queue was forming behind them.

"The Thistletop goblins did it?" Sheriff Hemlock asked flatly.

Shinya blinked. They knew nothing about 'Thistletop' beyond the fact it was a name dropped by Tsuto and their only potential clue to Shizu's whereabouts. "I...have to assume so."

"You'll have to excuse me if I don't have anyone to spare for a lethal assault on Thistletop based on a mere assumption."

"Well I do," chirped a sharp, high voice. 

A tall Mwangi settler with dark brown skin and long, black braids stepped out from the queue. She was young, definitely no older than Shinya. A lean, mongrel cat with white socks on its back legs walked a figure eight between her boots.

"I don't care how lethal it is," said the girl. "If there's even the slightest chance I can save my b-erm-friend, you can count on me."

"Great! Who else is with us?" Shinya called out to the other townsfolk, arms spread wide.

The silence was so deafening that sheriff themself had to break the silence with a throat-clearing cough.

"Fine, just me and Skippy then."

Less great, but one and a quarter allies on a do-or-die mission was infinitely better than none. "Great! I'm Shinya Kaijitsu and a daft hand with a blade if I do say so myself."

Not that it'd done them any favors against goblins thus far.

"Liri Akenja. I'm an ap-erm-wizard."

An apprentice wizard and Skippy the cat. Greaaat.

#*#*#*#*

Ameko followed Shalo all night through miles of muck-splattering, branch-thwopping, mosquito-infested wetland. The only light in that belching compost heap that wasn't a will-o'-the-wisp came from the light spell she placed on the symbol of Shelyn she wore around her neck. Which drew even more mosquitoes.

By the time the marsh spewed out the first morning mists, Ameko had slapped and scratched her head and neck to a swollen, red balloon. "Are we there yet?" she asked through gritted teeth.

"Put out your light. We're here." Shalo pointed into the hazy green and gold distance.

A crude wooden palisade surrounded a ramshackle village on stilts. The wooden gate laid in shambles in an algae-filled pool. The guard huts on either side of the gate were empty.

Goblins were small and camouflage green, but they were notoriously noisy. This Licktoad Village was as silent as a grave.

"Shalo, what happened to the goblins?"

The elf frowned and shook their head. "I don't know, but if we aren't careful, it may well happen to us, too."

Shalo entered the dilapidated village with their longbow in hand. Ameko followed, drawing a rapier in one hand and throwing dagger in the other. Hut after hut stood empty and agape. They made their way unimpeded to the chief's hut.

Shalo tried the double doors to no avail. "They're barred from the inside."

"Allow me," Ameko grinned. She stuck her rapier through the narrow door gap and levered up the bar. The doors opened with a swift, solid kick of her mucky boot.

The two were blasted with the musty reek of mold. Poorly preserved horse and dog heads stared at them with empty sockets from the walls of the throne room. Brine-pickled bodies of smaller birds and vermin hung from the rafters. At the far end, the chief and the fifteen remaining Licktoad goblins cowered around a rickety wooden throne.

The goblins hopped and screeched in panic. They did so long enough that Ameko had time to cast comprehend languages on herself to understand what exactly they were screaming about.

"Walking dead!", "Walking dead are back!", "Wahhh!", and "We're deaddd!". The longer that the two stood there, however, the less raucous and rabid the goblins’ antics became. After several minutes, they even quieted down enough to hear something other than their own panicked screams.

“We’re not undead,” Shalo said as calmly as possible in Goblin. “We would, however, like to know what happened with the undead.”

“Not undead?”, “Not undead!”, “Attack!”.

"Shit!" screamed Ameko, chucking her dagger point-blank into the charging green mass as she stumbled back.

"Shut the doors!" Shalo barked out over the roar of war screeches. They backed further out from the hut, two arrows nocked to their bow.

Ameko dropped her rapier, grabbed the wooden handles, and yanked with all her might. The doors shuddered and creaked on their hinges as five small but fast-moving bodies crashed into the wood and were crashed into by the ten behind them.

"Hold them as long as you can!"

"That's not gonna be long," Ameko growled, already sweating and straining as the doors pulled against her grip.

Undeterred, a goblin wriggled through each of the narrow window holes on either side of the door. Shalo shot them dead as soon as they popped free with a well-placed arrow to the eye. A second pair followed suit. Then a third. A fourth, each brain-gouged goblin bouncing off their fallen brethren to plop into the marsh.

"Gods, this is depressing." Though Ameko did have to admit it was getting easier to hold the doors.

Then the doors exploded off their hinges in a screaming blaze of smoke, powder, flaming goblin, and surprisingly colorful sparks. Ameko was thrown off her feet by the initial blast, splashing down into the slimy marsh just as the fireworks' grand, spangled boom lit up the village with every color under the sun.

Ameko swam up out of the vomit-green waters as fast as humanly possible. She came up spitting, nearly retching, brinemarsh and algae, more of which clumped in her hair and between her skin and clothes like a new coat of mud and slime. She crawled up onto a raised wooden walkway and raised a hand in spellcraft.

"P-prestidigit the fuck off of me," she croaked, doing her best not to taste the last of the gritty slop in her mouth.

Though agonizingly slow, the muck peeled thick and clean off Ameko's hair, skin, mouth, and clothes. She waited in a huffy, cross-legged slouch for the magic to do its thing. It wasn't like Shalo duelling the goblin chief on the next walkway over needed her help.

Sure enough, the last little green head went plopping into the marsh. Shalo kicked the falling body in after it. Whatever grudge the elf had against goblinkind, Ameko made a mental note not to get on their bad side.

#*#*#*#*

It wasn't like Tsuto could simply run back to Magnimar. That was where Nula had found him in the first place. Instead, he hopped on a boat and shipped off to Varisia's traditional haven for those seeking shelter but not necessarily law, the city of Riddleport.

Once a secret pirate haven, Riddleport had grown over the last three centuries into a port city in its own right. True to its roots, it was the harbor for every get rich quick dream imaginable, though for every success story there were a dozen nameless bodies buried in potters’ fields or tossed to the hungry denizens of the sea.

"There she bows!" the captain called out at midmorning.

"Not blowing today, is she?" Tsuto chuckled.

The captain only shook their head and pointed out toward the rocky coastline. Tucked between two jagged-face cliffs was the secluded harbor. Before it, a massive stone arch soared across the sea between the crags.

Tsuto's head tipped all the way back to his shoulders talking it in. The thing must've spanned over seven hundred feet and peaked over three hundred over the waves. It was carved with huge, completely unintelligible runes and gylphs.

"Hmm?" In the air above, distracting from the magnificent tourist attraction, was a shadow in the otherwise brilliant blue sky. "Is it always overcast on a clear day here?"

"Oh, aye, that's the Blot. Expect it's one of them cyphermages trying to pull a pegleg off us 'superstitious sailors.' Joke's on them. The Blot's been hanging over us for about a month and we're still raking it in."

"Stick it to the Magic Man, I always say."

"Yeah! Stick it right up his high, horsey ass! Welcome to Riddleport, friend, you're gonna fit right in."


	5. Grease and Tentacles

It took Shinya, Liri, and Skippy the motherfucking cat two hours by foot to make the six mile journey to Thistletop, a curiously round island sixty feet off the Lost Coast clifs. A rope bridge spanned the gulf between cliff and island. Amidst its patches of nettles and briars was large wooden stockade, a pair of watchtowers looming thirty feet over the gate.

Shinya, Liri, and Skippy hid in the trees at the mouth of the bridge. The chirp of birds, creak of the swaying bridge, and crash of the surf below was almost soothing. Almost. 

“So what, are we just gonna camp out here until nightfall?” Liri asked in a hushed voice.

Shinya wracked their brain for everything they knew about goblins, which wasn’t much. But they did recall that goblins could see in the dark like themself and their twin. Liri, however, needed light to be useful.

“No, we better go before we need torches.”

“Well, I’m the squishy one here, so I’ll follow your lead.”

“And Skippy?” they asked jokingly.

“Skippy does whatever the Hell she damn well pleases,” she replied, deadly serious.

“O-kay.”

Shinya took a deep breath and snuck onto the plank-and-rope bridge. There was no response from the stockade.

Little did they know, four goblins mounted on hairless, vicious goblin dogs always patrolled the grounds around the wooden fort. Fortunately for the little party, the four were presently enthralled by a game of “Killgull,” a mean-spirited, fairly self-explanatory pastime. As were their dogs.

Thus, Shinya made it to the other side without raising a single alarm. They waved the others across.

“Great, now how are we getting in?” asked Liri.

“Watch and learn,” Shinya winked, confidence bolstered by their first success. Quick as...a cat, but really more like a squirrel, they scampered up the rough, mismatched ship timbers of the wall. 

They let a rope down for Liri (and Skippy?) from the top and surveyed the large, open courtyard. Tenacious clumps of trampled grass grew here and there in the hard-packed earth, places stained with blood or scratched with furrows. Two dead goblins laid slumped at the entrance to an outbuilding. Four goblin dogs, their snarling faces with the same twitching nose, beady eyes, and protruding teeth as a rat, fought each other for the bloated corpse of a third dead goblin.

This time, Shinya looked to Liri. “We gotta get past...that. Any ideas?”

“Watch and learn,” she smirked. 

Liri crouched down and pointed a finger toward a large, rusty water trough. With a word of murmured magic, a glassy, grease slick spread across the ground before it. Then she turned her finger toward the carcass.

“Prestidigi-hot-sauce.”

The effect was immediate. The dogs yelped and forsook their prize, racing as though for their very lives for the trough. Only for their paws to slip in Liri’s grease trap. They slammed head-first, full-speed into the trough.

Shinya and Liri both winced. Skippy meowed, rather smugly.

#*#*#*#*

With a snap of his fingers, Kikonu directed a pair of dire corbies to tote the unconscious, cum-slopping captive still tied to the toting-pole to the most religious room in the castle, a despoiled shrine of Desna. The Brinewall corbies, slavish worshipers of the King of the Wind Demons, Pazuzu, had done their literal damnedest to reconsecrate and redecorate the shrine.

The image of Pazuzu, a towering humanoid with four wings, a bird’s head, and a scorpion’s tail had been painted in blood all over the walls. But they’d given special despoiling attention to the statue of Desna that stood over the altar and old, creaky pews. Her wings were hacked down the middle, making four from tow. Her head had been removed and replaced with the rough carving of a predatory bird’s head. A long, barbed braid of dried nettles hung from before and behind to symbolize the demon lord’s poisonous cocks and tail.

Out from the shadows stepped a dire corbie in feather robes caked with blood and other fluids of slaughter, the priestess Nevaki. She clacked her jet-black beak delightedly at the sight of the despoiled changeling. “Lord Kikonu, you shouldn’t have!”

“You know how I do love to dote on you.” And get off in a church.

“Dote on the Demon Lord of the Sky and Winged Creatures, you mean.”

“Yeah, sure, just get on with it.”

The bird-brained priestess clacked her beak and drew a rusty butcher’s knife. She hacked through the captive’s ropes, letting them drop to the floor. Nevaki sheathed her knife, grabbed the changeling by the hair, and dragged their limp body between the pews to the front of the altar.

She wrapped a thick, filth-caked chain around their waist, under their rounded tits, and around the sides of the altar, pulling them tight to the stone. Nevaki shackled their wrists together, the tight cuffs linked by a single metal ring, and pulled their arms over their drooping head. They fastened the shackles to a hook on the altar top, giving the captive’s arms no leeway.

With the offering secured, the priestess began to chant. Kikonu and his underlings all readied their cocks. From a jagged hole in the ground, ten slimy tentacles rose, six of which ended in thick, knotted phalluses. They were followed by two leathery wings unfurling to a span of twelve feet and the mollusk-like, monstrous face of a half-fiend decapus.

The hideous, Abyssal nightmare was one of dozens of an otherwise extinct brood of abominations of ancient Thassilonian. Specially bred as a weapon of war, this spawn of Pazuzu had become the dire corbies’ greatest defense and honored, bestial lord.

The creature’s milky white eyes dilated at the sight of the wet, bird-musked offering. A tentacle wrapped around either of Shizu’s calves and thighs, spreading their legs apart. A second two tentacles wrapped around their neck and around their temples, forcing their head up and back against the altar.

Two tentacle-dicks snaked over Shizu’s half-opened mouth. Two poised before their raw, swollen asshole and two before their equally puffed and tightened pussy. Licking its lips and fangs, the creature shoved each and every one of its six knotted phallus’ into Shizu’s rape-used holes.

Shizu screamed or rather choked awake into a writhing, chain-clanking world of agony. Six dicks forced apart and pounded their throat, pussy, and anus into the stone altar. Their helpless body shuddered and squirmed in the grip of the half-fiend’s tentacles and the biting metal, cock-gagged shrieks and squelches forced from every hole in their body.

With the creature’s knotted cocks forced tight and rubbing against each other in the straining flesh sheathes of Shizu’s overstuffed throat, pussy, and anus, it rapidly beat and pistoned its new bitch into a snorting, eye-rolling, slathering heat. Raw, searing sensation exploded from their churned, clenched guts out to the curling tips of their fingers and toes. Again, and again, and again.

Shizu, bucking like a whore between the half-fiend’s six cocks, leaking drool and snot like an animal, was stripped of every last tatter of control. The decapus’ cumslut’s shafts squeezed in a spasming death-grip around its heads and knots.

The demon lord’s spawn let out a low, stone-quaking roar. Unholy seed exploded into Shizu’s throat, womb, and anus. Their convulsing shafts only clamped tighter, milking the abomination for every last, soul-staining drop.

Far less unholy but no more holy cum burst from the tengu and dire corbie cocks. As the decapus pumped its new cum toilet full to the brim with its seed, Nevaki unobtrusively unhooked Shizu’s shackles and loosed the chain binding them to the altar. When her lord and vessel of Pazuzu had finished, it dragged the semi-conscious Shizu down the shrine hole with it.


	6. Taking Names...

Stepping off the docks, Tsuto quickly found himself in the Wharf District, a series of warehouses and cheap grog shops where merchant and pirate crews mingled raucously in a haze of rum-soaked debauchery and blood. Inns and shops had grimed windows and peeling paint hinting at the prosperity of older times, all of which suited the run-of-the-mill sailor just fine.

Unusual for morning hours, however, a large crowd milled about in the middle of the street, some even filing together. Tsuto wove this way and that through the throng to see what the hubbub was about, his swift fingers batting away several wallet-grabby hands in the process.

The line ended, as all lines should, through the main doors of a faux-gilded gambling hall and den of other assorted debaucheries. A jaunty banner above the Gold Goblin proclaimed today’s special hours and occasion as “Cheat the Devil and Take His Gold.” On either side of the hall’s titular, glittering goblin statue stood two sultry beauties clad in nothing but bat wings, devil horns, poker-chip patsies, and tails to beckon the line onward and inward.

At the next grabby hand, Tsuto caught the youth’s wrist, yanked them out of line and side-stepped into their place.

“Hey there, handsome,” crooned the nearest succubi(?). “It’s one gold to register.”

“And I take it no one enters today without registering?”

“Not a chance, hot stuff.”

He bemoaned his own pride in sporting behavior for not picking the pick-pocket’s pocket when he had the chance. But what could good guys like himself do? The half-elf fished out one of his dwindling number of gold coins from Nula’s Sandpoint job.

“Thanks, sugar dick,” winked the cheery devil woman. She pulled a small, grimy form printed on cheap newspaper from some hidden pocket in the gold goblin’s posterior and a charcoal pen from her updo. “Only thing you need to do is sign your name here, honey cock.”

Tsuto squinted at the print in her hand.

“I, ____, do hereby sacrifice my immortal soul and the worldly sum of ten pieces of silver to the Devil to hold in escrow against his own stake of ten thousand silver coins…”

He signed right there. As ‘Honeycock.’

The devil woman, ever the professional, did not roll her eyes. She’d read a lot worse pseudonyms, and it wasn’t even noon. Instead, she smiled and stepped out of the doorway for “Honeycock” to enter.

Dozens of gamblers, waitress succubi, and shirtless, oiled bouncers milled about the main gambling hall, weaving amid packed tables. Horn-sporting dealers shuffled cards and spun wheels. At the center of it all was a short podium mounted by a massive gilded chest affixed to the floor by similarly gaudy chains. Two bouncers stood on either side of it, muscled arms crossed over their chests.

From the cloth-draped ceiling high above hung a brass birdcage. Inside crouched a small, bat-winged, pointy-tailed imp.

“Are you real?” Tsuto called up half-jokingly.

The creature pulled a bug-eyed face and rattled the bars in answer. Then dropped back into a sulking slouch.

The black market imp trade was alive and well. Couldn’t say he was surprised, or that he particularly cared. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he strolled off toward the nearest card table whistling a fittingly jaunty tune.

#*#*#*#*

Ameko and Shalo had searched the entire Licktoad village. Rather than any sign of prisoners, all they’d found was a stupid, muck-caked treasure chest. The one redeeming item amongst the goblin’s paltry treasure was a gold and ivory fan depicting a gecko walking amid cherry trees. The fan was worth a pretty penny, but the crude map scribbled on the reverse side now presented their only hope of finding Shizu.

They’d been following the map’s path through the marsh for hours, long, sweaty, mosquito-infested hours. When Shalo finally stopped, Ameko walked right into the solid wall of their back. She bounced off with a grunted curse.

The elf, unphased, pointed from the hairy, upside-down L on the fan to the fifty-foot cliff rising along the marsh’s southern border. Its craggy mug was a tangle of jutting rocks and bright green vines and nettles. The fan’s “X” was over a hole at its base.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Ameko muttered. She tried her best not to get her hopes up, but that wonderkid elf had just parsed a child’s scrawl to bring them to an actual location. Anything was possible.

“Step where I step,” said Shalo, hands at the ready.

They encountered no goblin sentries on the way to a nettle-curtained fissure in the rock. With time of the essence, Shalo drew their short sword and simply hacked off the base of the curtain.

“We’ll need your light,” said the elf.

“On it.” Ameko set her medallion aglow and followed Shalo through the narrow pass into a much larger cavern.

Six human skeletons laid scattered across the ground and pooled water, their armor far too old and rusted to be anyone’s from the town. Rather more ominous was the armored skeleton sitting motionless atop an even larger chest. The goblins cries of “walking dead” suddenly made a lot more sense.

“We’re not exploring this cave without a fight, are we?” asked Ameko, drawing her rapier and dagger.

“Seems unlikely.”

“Guess we might as well get started.” She put down her foot, stomping a skull to smithereens under her boot.

All six remaining skeletons rose to their feet with a bony clatter. The ranger and bard-rogue were ready.

Shalo, more experienced than ever after that last bout of goblin-slaying, fired a spread of three arrows into the skeleton minions before they converged on the human and themself. Two skulls shattered, taking down their necromantic hosts, but one remained standing, Shalo’s arrow protruding through the front and back of the bone.

Ameko took up a defensive position and an enchanted chant, lacing her and Shalo’s weapons with enhancing magic. “One hundred bottles of beer on the wall…”

The skeleton boss pointed at her, sending three skeleton heads swivelling in her direction. Then it leaped off its hoard and into a slashing attack upon Shalo. Its blade, a Tian wakizashi, cut a deep red line across their shoulder.

Its minions swarmed Ameko, hacking away with their rusted blades. One swept through her guard, stabbing into her side.

“Ninety-FUCK bottles of beer,” she swore, stabbing into the fray. 

Her rapier knocked the skull right off one attacker, earning her another bloody gouge in the side from its fellows. Ameko spat red, garbling the next verse. The rapier nearly slipped from her grasp, but at least the sloppy swing of her dagger cut loose another skull.

Only old Arrow-Head remained on her, bashing its blade into her trembling rapier guard. The shock of the blows traveled all the way to her chattering red teeth.

A short sword whistled through the air. Arrow-Head clattered to the cavern floor, a bloodied Shalo standing in its place.

“Praise the Incorruptible Fuck,” muttered Ameko, wiping her arm across her mouth. For a second there, she thought she caught the tilt of a grin on the elf’s lips.

“Take a look at this,” said Shalo, all business. They held out the boss’ sword on both hands.

“Wh…?” She spotted the pommel’s hidden compartment before she could finish her question. Ameko popped it open to reveal a miniature, mithral scroll tube. Only she could read aloud the letter written in Tian within.

“My son, my heir. I was not angry with you for opening the warding box. I was angry with myself for withholding the truth from you and forcing you to seek out what I should have given to you. The words I spoke to you shame me to think of them. I write this note as an apology, and to beg you to leave these secrets to history.

“The next few days will be the most important I have faced in many years. If our family’s enemies have forgotten us, I shall reunite with you and your wife, and your mother and I shall reveal the truth to you. If they still seek the contents of the warding box, I fear that I may not return. 

“The box, hidden in the vault under Brinewall Castle, holds our family’s greatest treasure. I pray to the North Star I will not grant our foes the satisfaction of killing me themselves. If it comes to it, let my death by my own hand be my final act to protect you, so that our enemies believe our line ended.

“You must destroy this letter and never return to Brinewall. Elsewise, our enemies will never stop searching for us.

“I hope to see you again soon my son, but my heart tells me that I will not. I am sorry to have failed you, but I am proud of you, and I know you will survive this old man’s shame.”

The letter was signed ‘Rokuro Kajitsu.’

The paper fluttered in Ameko’s shaking hands, her breath fast and shallow. It all made sense now. Her grandfather, Rokuro, had buried this “family treasure” in haunted old Brinewall and disturbed the dead. When the goblins took Shizu out here to Brinestump, the vengeful dead found them, ransacked the village, and hauled her sibling off to their accursed castle.

“Sh-Shalo.”

“Yes?”

“My sibling’s in Brinewall. I don’t know about any goblins out there, but...I can’t handle more of these undead by myself.”

The elf placed a slender, solid hand on her shoulder. “We began this hunt together. Together, we’ll finish it.”

It must’ve been the general exhaustion and release of all that adrenaline, but Ameko found herself blinking very hard, very fast. She nodded wordlessly, not yet trusting her voice to speak.


	7. ...Getting Demolished in the Ass

Shinya and Liri’s stealthing luck lasted right up until they snuck through the main doors of the fort and into the goblin throne room. The rooms itself was homey, for goblins.

Furs hung from the walls, mostly black and red-striped firepelt skins, various dog pelts, and what looked like horse hides. Four square timbers supported the ceiling, their faces studded with dozens of iron spikes. The lower, goblin-level reaches were decorated with dozens of impaled and severed hands in various stages of decay. 

Between the timbers was the wooden platform of a throne heaped with dog pelts and horse hides. Dog skulls adorned the armrests, and a grinning horse skull leered over the throne’s back.

The goblin warchief, his giant riding gecko, his three best commandos, and the warchanter all looked up from their riveting game of “Punchcorpse.”

“Oooh, shit.”

It wasn’t much of a fight. In fact, Shinya and Liri immediately attempted to high-tail it out of Thistletop. They were thwarted not three feet in the courtyard by the goblins’ thrown tanglefoot bags.

The commandos extracted them from the gluey tar and resin and dragged them into the throne room on their knees. They wrenched the humans’ arms behind their backs and bound them at the wrists and elbows with coarse rope. Then they were thrown to the floor, Liri on her stomach and Shinya on their back.

Liri began kicking and screaming even before the goblins had finished hacking through her clothes. The commandos responded with one of their number shoving his cock and balls into her mouth as a gag while the others finished their work.

The two other commandos each grabbed one of her flailing legs by the thigh. They twisted her hips to the side so one could pork her in the cunt while the other thrust into her asshole. She squealed through her nose just like a spitted sow, writhing and straining between her three goblin rapists to no avail.

Shinya, well versed in goblin brutality, broke into pathetic, shuddering sobs on their back. The warchief responded by grabbing them by the throat and choking out their cries while pistoning his dick and balls into Shinya’s gasping mouth.

The warchanter climbed up onto Shinya’s cock, rubbing her tiny cunt against it until they were forced into an erection. She licked the first beads of precum from their head. With her nails digging into their hips, she impaled her tiny goblin pussy down to the hilt of their dick with a ravenous moan.

With the warchanter shrieking and riding their cock as hard as goblin dog, Shinya didn’t notice the warchief’s giant gecko pushing their twitching legs apart. They couldn’t, however, miss the searing pain of their ripping anal walls as the lizard rammed its oversized cock up the full stretch of their anus.

Shinya’s body bucked in agony. Their constricted throat seized down around the warchief’s dick. Their straining anus clenched hard around the gecko’s cock. Their own dick pulsed burning hot in the tight, wet squeeze of the warchanter’s pussy.

To Shinya’s immense, tearful shame, cum burst from his head into the goblin’s cunt. Seed, in turn, exploded from the warchief’s dick into their throat and the animal’s cock up their spasming anus.

But as Shinya well knew, one raping release was not enough for the little hellions. The two humans were kept in the throne room for hours, collecting cum as proper for such wretched toilets as themselves.

As for Skippy the cat, there was no sign.


	8. Dark Wings Spread

Tsuto never realized how long he’d been at the gambling tables until a procession of employees entered and he looked up just long enough to glimpse the windows dark with twilight. The line of semi-nude bouncers and effectively nude waitress devils carried torches fashioned after pitchforks skewering heads of burning cloth and straw. They lit large braziers, giving the hall an infernal hue.

A hush fell over the crowd of gamblers as a balding, red-faced man climbed atop the central podium. He stood before the gold, chain-shrouded chest with a succubus on either arm. He wore a formal suit and a bronze cap upon the end of his left arm, his hand amputated at the wrist. A key-like hook protruded from the head of the cap.

That had to have been the owner of the Gold Goblin and tournament host. Tsuto had heard his name dropped several times over the course of the day, usually in conjunction with a complaint, a curse, or both. “Saul ‘Arse-Gouging-Price-Fucker’ Vancaskin,” if the last drunken ramble were true.

“Welcome, one and all, to the Gold Goblin Gambling Hall and your chance to cheat the Devil and win back not only your soul but all of his gold as well.” Saul pat the very large, very full chest. “I hope you found your reception by Asmodeus’ lovely temptresses suitably entertaining.”

There was a murmur of laughter and a few carousing hoots, but not one soul in the crowd had yet to take their eyes off the heaping, metallic mounds.

“Let’s take this moment to thank Old Scratch himself for attending this event. Not only did he loan us these lovely, dark angels, but he also emptied the deepest vaults of Nessus itself to provide the gold for this tournament.”

Saul pointed to the imp in the birdcage with a flourish of bronze. “Old Scratch” flew into a flurry of rage, banging the cage bars, spitting, howling, and screaming vile epithets in Infernal at all assembled. Most impressively, the little imp managed to divert everyone’s attention away from the chest.

Except, Tsuto noticed, for five individuals who closed their eyes all at once. Weir...CRACKA-BOOM!

A blinding explosion of fireworks exploded from one of the braziers. The burst blinded everyone in the main hall except for the five and Tsuto, who’d managed to raise his arm against the blast.

One of women’s voices, enhanced by bardic magic, boomed out over the screaming, running, and jostling crowd. “You’re blind you stupid fucks! Stop running and drop to the ground, and we might just let you live!”

Her four companions drew their swords to emphasize the point. Without her bardic magic, however, the threat was mostly lost on the blinded gamblers. Half the crowd dropped but the other half continued in full-on panic mode.

The four with swords split into pairs to take care of the first two bouncers, the panicking ones. The bard readied some new spell. A new, goateed contender who obviously wasn’t blinded made their way over and around the hapless patrons on route to the chest with a scroll in hand.

Tsuto smiled wearily and shook his head. If anyone was taking back the coin he’d lost to this gold sinkhole, it was gonna be him. Soft and swift as a shadow, he slipped behind Suspicious Goatee and slammed a brutal kick into their back.

Crack! Suspicious Goatee went down with a death gurgle.

“Ah, must’ve been a caster.” He squatted down and raised the side of their outer robe, revealing a wand and spellbook along with other, less magical accoutrements. “A caster, indeed.”

“Anga!” the bard screamed. “You’re dead, knife ears!”

“Wait for me to recoup my losses off your dearly departed first, won’t you?” A man of his word, he stuffed everything he could grab into his pack.

“You bastard!” She’d reached him by them, stabbing her rapier right at his face.

By some stroke of ill fortune, the corpse-looting Tsuto wasn’t fast enough. The needle-like blade caught him right in the cheek, slashing him open from the corner of the mouth.

“Gahhh!” He fell back onto one hand, the other pressed to his bleeding cheek. 

The bard’s rapier skewered the air where his eye had been.

Tsuto threw himself back up onto his feet and swung his heel into the bard’s temple in the same deadly flow. Crack! She went down on top of Suspicious Goatee. 

Tsuto glanced at the pairs of hired muscle. The meatheads had yet to notice the fall of their more magical companions and continued clobbering and binding bouncers.

He shrugged and went through the bard’s wallet. To steal from a thief was one of the world’s very few justices. But still not enough to make up his debt to the Goblin.

Tsuto rose to his feet with liquid grace. He turned his attention onto the nearest pair of meatheads. He struck without a sound.

#*#*#*#*

Shizu’s mind floated in darkness, quite comfortably. Then every ache, pain, and exhaustion trickled back into being. Their body, stripped naked, laid shivering in a creche of wet rock.

They pushed up to sitting on the floor of a huge, dripping grotto. Tiny motes of glowing light drifted and bobbed in the air, giving the place a nauseating haze and illuminating the towering, four-winged shapes painted across the moist walls. Their eyes followed the walls up their dizzying heights to the cavern ceiling. There were two separate tunnels amidst the stalactites and no telling where either went.

“Fuck.”

But as their eyes and body adjusted, the more Shizu saw, sensed. Remnants of a leathery egg shell were strewn around their creche, wet and softly pulsing. On a flat rock against the opposite wall was a small hoard of treasure, now including their leather duster and longbow. It was also...pulsing.

Shizu clasped their sides, an icy chill descending their spine. Magic. It bled from the hoard in a warm-like aura, flickered off the edges of their own hair and skin, and burned as hot as a searing iron from behind them.

Breathing short and shakily, Shizu turned their head over their shoulder.

“Boo!”

They toppled onto the back with a yelp, back and palms smacking against the rock. A jet black shape flapped up and onto a low stalagmite by their shoulder.

“Woah! Easy there, hagspawn. Didn’t mean to give ya a concussion,” quoth the raven. 

In Abyssal. Which Shizu somehow both understand and...could also speak back. “H-hi? I’m Shizu and I’m very confused.”

“Right, right, right. From the top, then. Hi, I’m Xuzu. I’ve been sent by, let’s say, a mysterious benefactor to be your familiar guide to the wonderful world of witchcraft. That’s right, Shizu, you’re a witch. Well, if ya accept your patron’s power.”

The new witch’s head spun like a theme ride teacup. Witch. Mysterious benefactor. Hagspawn. Click, click, click.

So their mother was an evil, shapeshifting hag. Ordinarily, that would’ve come as devastating news, but the fact that their absentee parent was offering Shizu magic in their hour of most desperate need completely killed the blow.

“Great, I accept. How do I magic myself out of here?”

“Ok, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Bad.”

“Bad news is, I’ve got spells for ya, but you’re too fucking exhausted to use any of ‘em right now. We’ll get back to that after, say, eight hours of sleep.”

“And the good?”

“Hexes, baby! A witch’s bread and butter. For you, I’ve got ‘evil eye,’ perfect for that changeling orb of yours, and, da-da-da-da, ‘flight!’”

Shizu’s eyes narrowed, though not evilly. “Why am I hearing air-quotes around ‘flight?’”

The raven cleared their throat with an unsettlingly human cough. “Because you’re just a fledgling, kid. Real flight can’t kick in until you’ve spread your wings and fallen flat on your face a couple times. Right now, the best you’ve got is feather falling and a once per day levitation.”

“Ughhh.” Of course there were weird, finicky rules about their new powers. Such was the natural outcome of taking power from a weird, finicky patron.

Shizu climbed to their feet and stalked over to the treasure pile. They tossed aside a shield and grabbed their bow and duster. They belted the coat closed around them but couldn’t quite tear their eyes off the magically pulsing artifacts.

There was a starknife enchanted to be a returning weapon, a ring capable of summoning a ram-like charging force, a compass with a magic light function, a wood-and-silver disc etched with Brinewall Castle under the moon, and a lovingly carved stone statuette of demon lord Pazuzu.

Shizu bit their lip. Then scooped the whole lot, minus the shield, into their pockets. They grabbed up several handfuls of shiny gold coin for good measure. If they had to be fucked by bird humanoids and their monsters, they were damn well getting paid for it.

“Alright, I’m ready,” said Shizu, returning to Xuzu beneath the two shadowed tunnels above. “Walk me through ‘flight.’”

“Think happy thoughts,” said their familiar. “It’s not about weight. It’s knowing where you want to go.”

Shizu wanted up and they wanted out, more than anything they’d ever wanted before. Just like that, their feet left the cavern floor, their body drawn upward through the chest.

“Ha…!” A startled, marvelling smile broke across their face. They floated up toward the rightmost shaft with the slightest, playful winding. Through the darkness, they could see a ledge at the end of the tunnel.

And the heads of ten, snaking tentacles. 

Shizu gulped down a scream. Their body dropped. Only to be seized around the waist and yanked back up toward the half-fiend decapus.

They screamed, grabbing for the starknife. A second tentacle caught their wrists, wrenching them over their head. The beast’s third and fourth tentacles seized their kicking ankles, spreading their legs into an aching split beneath them.

Before Shizu could shriek again, two knotted cocks dived down their opened mouth. As they choked and gagged on its throat-stuffing dicks, two phalluses shoved up asshole with two more wedging tight up their pussy.

Shizu’s stuffed body, crushed in the middle by the tentacle coiled around their waist, banged and jerked against the tunnel wall as the decapus’ knotted cocks tore their throat, pussy, and anal walls apart. 

So thick were the heavy, combined girths of its pistoning tentacles that Shizu’s straining shafts were stretched taut to the nerve from twitching mouth to throbbing base. The slightest rub sent webs of spasming heat through their throat, ass, and pussy. The monster’s gut-crushing rams broke them from the inside out.

Shizu’s throat, ass, and pussy exploded with electric feel, clamping wildly onto their beast rapist’s knotted dicks. As the decapus growled and shot its vile loads into their ravenous holes, a clear water burst from Shizu’s cunt, squirting from their split legs.

Their eyes rolled to the back of their head, but their body continued to shudder, jerk, and squirt as the monster knotted in their flesh pumped their stomach, womb, and anus full to a pregnant swell.


	9. The Cost of Living

In the end, Tsuto recouped a total of seventy-four gold in chips and coin from the six would-be-heisters. Which left him short by give or take a thousand gold. 

“Well, darn.”

There were several much stronger curses thrown around by the enraged swarm jostling, quarreling, and loudly demanding refunds from the desk.

Saul, now with a bare-chested, bruised, and cantankerous bouncer on either arm climbed back onto the central podium. “Everyone, let’s all take a deep breath. I’ll be the only one almost-robbed tonight. Please, allow us to cash out your chips at 110% value.”

There was much grumbling, but even the loudest protester could see it was the best deal they were apt to get tonight. A better deal than if they’d stayed for the entire tournament, thought Tsuto.

As the surly customers queued up to cash out and begrudgingly depart, most of the traumatized staff threw in their horns, wings, and towels to resign on the spot as well. The imp in the cage slammed the door behind them. They flew out, flipping Saul off with a hearty, departing “pfbbbbt!”

The deflated gambling hall owner approached Tsuto with a weary smile. “You really saved our asses back there. Looks like the Gold Goblin owes you a debt, Mister…?”

“Kaijitsu, Tsuto Kaijitsu. And, ah, it seems we have something in common,” said the half-elf with his own apologetic grin.

The gleam returned to the businessman’s eye. “Why don’t you follow me to my office and we can...draw up a payment plan?”

There was a sudden sinking feeling in Tsuto’s gut, but he refused to let his smile falter. Without enough cash left to purchase another ship ticket out of there, his options were few and unpleasant. He followed the shorter man. At least there might be drinks.

Saul, indeed, poured two shots of fiery brandy over a warming fire. He left the bottle on the table for Tsuto to help himself as he sat behind the desk and began regaling the half-elf with his life story. Tsuto did, liberally, as a matter of survival.

“I used to be a gang leader, back in the day. Ended up costing me my health, my fortune, my family, even my gods-damned hand. But I’m a survivor, Tsuto, first and foremost.

“I chipped and scraped together every meager scrap I could get my hand on and bought the Gold Goblin. She used to be infamous here in Riddleport, but she fell on harder times than me.

“Anywho, I was too old to relocate or return to the life, so I’ve done my damnedest to turn the Goblin back into a real business. She’s getting there into the red, but I’ve got bad blood with the local crime scene, as you’ve just seen. The crimelords are never gonna let me go legit, not without help.”

“That’s wh-here I come in,” Tsuto hiccuped.

“That’s where you come in. You’ve got just the muscle to keep us out of protection rackets and strong-arm jobs. So here’s the deal: you join me as my junior partner and ‘specialist.’

“Day-to-day, you turn up as a dealer, bouncer, etc. downstairs, but that’s just your cover. Your real job will be a combination of bodyguard, messenger, and consultant. Salaried, of course, at ten gold a week plus a cut of whatever profits you help rake in downstairs. If you need it, we got room and board here at the Goblin, free of charge.”

“Wh-what’s the catch?”

“Any alcohol comes out of your paycheck.”

“D-darn.”

Saul perused the front’s receipts in front of him as the half-elf mulled it over. “So what do you say,” he squinted, “Honeycock? You ready to start paying me back, or is this gonna get ugly?”

By this point in time Saul’s few, remaining loyal employees had joined the two in the office. The four, the largest of whom hadn’t been anywhere in sight during the heist, formed a solid wall of hulking muscle between Tsuto and the door. It was enough to sober man or elf.

The half-elf gave a weak laugh and picked up a pen from the desk. “Where do I sign?”

#*#*#*#*

The Thistletop goblins dragged the semi-conscious Shinya and Liri from the throne room to the dungeons below. The damp stone corridor echoed with the muffled sounds of grunts, cries, and flesh against flesh. The iron door opened with a rusted screak to a dark cell with a musty nest of rags, dog hides, and straw along one wall and a long workbench cluttered with pliers, hooks, chains and other gear along the other.

At the center of it all was a ruggedly handsome man with a shock of wavy brown hair. He was shackled to the floor on his knees by thick metal braces around his forearms and calves. He was the source of the cries, his face twisted in agony as he was mounted by a brown-furred, seven-foot goblin behind him.

“Orik!” Liri inhaled sharply.

The goblins threw the two new, bound captives in on their bellies with chittering laughter. They slammed the iron door shut after them. To Shinya’s surprise, they didn’t hear the clunk of a lock. Though perhaps it wasn’t so surprising, given the bear-sized guard before them.

The bugbear had yet to notice the newcomers, however, his bright red eyes dilated in feral rut and saliva dripping between his needle-like teeth. He dug filthy nails into Orik’s olive-skinned shoulders and blasted his thick, unwashed cock up the sobbing man’s asshole.

Shinya realized they only had until Orik’s bodily instinct took over and his anus wrang the seed from the goblinoid’s dick to make a move. They wormed their way toward the gear-heaped table, wrists straining desperately in the bonds of coarse rope.

The bugbear grunted faster, jackhammering into Orik’s asshole. The young man screamed, amber eyes bulging in agony.

Shinya’s hand slipped free. Without a second’s pause, they lurched to their feet.

The bugbear roared. He ripped his turgid cock from Orik’s anus, cum spurting from the head.

Shinya seized their katana. They turned and slashed in a single motion, slicing open the bugbear from gut to balls. Blood and sponge splurted from the goblin’s eviscerated dick.

The bugbear crashed to the floor, shrieking and pawing at his spilling guts. Shinya, barely holding back their own retch, swung their blade clean through the fallen beast’s neck.

“Th-thanks,” Orik rasped weakly. “Keys...on belt.”

Liri, still bound on her stomach, vomited right under her own nose. It was not the rescue any of them had in mind, but it was the only one they were going to get.

The young man's name was Orik Vancaskin. He was even more intimidating in his banded mail armor and bastard sword back in hand. Just looking at him gave Shinya a swarm of fluttering swallowtails in their stomach.

“So, ah, did you see the goblins take anyone else?” Their voice squeaked out somewhat higher than usual.

“That priest, Father Zantus, and his acolytes,” Orik replied with a grim frown. “They were all killed by this aasimar woman.”

“Nula.”

“Fuck her!” Liri piped up squeakily herself.

“There’s some kind of creature trapped here, ‘Malfeshkor,’ she called them,” Orik continued. “From what I gathered, she’s been trying to free them, presumably to set them loose on Sandpoint.”

“We can’t let that happen,” said Shinya, now equally grim. The news that Shizu wasn’t here came as a blow, but at least they hadn’t been mutilated, killed, or raped. “Do you know where Malfeshkor’s trapped?”

“No, only that they’re below these dungeons.”

“If we’re going to go, we should go now. The corridor’s empty,” said Liri.

“How can you be sure?” asked Orik.

The apprentice grinned much more shyly than before. “Skippy.”

Sure enough, upon opening the cell door, the only one in the dungeon hall was her mongrel cat. The three stayed in the cell while Liri sent Skippy padding stealthily through the halls as they could not.

“Oh! My gods! Skippy found it! Follow me.” Liri ran out into the hall with her everburning torch in hand, waving Shinya and Orik on after her.

Sure enough, there was a recently excavated stairwell. They followed the spiralling stone for what seemed like hours in the claustrophobic dark, dirt, and wet air. Just when Shinya was ready to scream some space into the endless, narrow shaft, Liri’s light caught the edge of an open door.

It was clearly not of the same make as the stonework above. Despite its surface having been defaced by chisel and hammer, intricate carvings of crowns and gemstones remained.

Shinya readied their katana and stepped in the room beyond. A statue of some ancient king clutching a book in one hand and a glaive in the other stood upon an upraised dais. Between them sat a marble throne, a ghostly figure flickering in the seat. He was the same man who appeared in the statues.

The figure did not attack but address an invisible audience on a loop, fingers decorated with hooked rings moving as he spoke. His words were too muted and garbled to make out even if Shinya spoke his language.

“I think he’s speaking Thassilonian,” said Liri over their shoulder.

“Do you know what he’s saying?”

“No, but I think that’s one of the runelords of greed. He would’ve ruled like thousands of years ago when this place was part of the Thassilonian Empire.”

“So that’s not a ghost?” asked Orik, poking his head in over Shinya’s other shoulder.

“No, just a spell, a permanent programmed image.”

Thus assured, Shinya, followed by the others, made their way further into the ancient hall. A wooden table had been set against the back wall. On it was a gold-and-silver seven-pointed star, one surface studded with nodules and blades, and the other bearing a thin, curved handle. Beside the table was the indented outline of just such a star, its shape covered by hollows and slits.

“Get ready,” said Shinya. They placed the key into the indentation and twisted the handle. A stone door in the wall opened with the softest series of clicks.

A wall of humid heat and the smell of burning hair washed over the party. Flames roared from the floor’s ten-foot-wide firepit carved as a seven-pointed star. But there was no sign of any killer creature.

“Shit!” said Orik. “She’s already loosed them!”

“Wait,” said Liri, touching a finger to either eyelid. “I want to see.”

She recoiled with a sharp intake of breath, grabbing Shinya and Orik’s shoulders. She pulled them toward her to whisper into their ears. “There. Right behind the door. Fuck, they’re big.”

Orik caught Shinya’s eye. He tilted his lowered blade toward the threshold. “What are you talking about? I don’t see shit.”

“Same,” squeaked Shinya, letting their lowered blade point in the same direction.

Liri gave a barely perceptible nod. “F-fine, you guys wanna go in there? Have fun.”

She stepped back, reaching for her dagger. As soon as she’d let them go, Shinya and Orik surged forward, slashing from either side into the doorway. A bloody X erupted in midair, Liri flinging her dagger at its center. It shunked into invisible flesh and yanked free with a gout of red, returning to her hand.

The unseen beast let out a chamber-shaking roar. Before anyone had the chance to react, Orik let out a bloody gurgle.

Malfeshkor’s invisibility shattered around the ten-foot, ash-furred barghest with their fangs sunk into Orik’s neck. Their claws ripped through his banded mail, the man’s head tearing free of his body.

Liri screamed his name, but her spell didn’t falter. The monstrous canine went down on splayed legs like any dog in the clear slick of her grease.

Shinya turned their own scream to a roar. They swung their sword down in an executioner’s arc, hacking again and again into the barghest’s tough hide as the beast scrambled to regain their footing, their blood spilling onto the oil. Only once Shinya finally hacked through every last tendon in the greater barghest’s neck did Malfeshkor finally still.

The joined chambers plunged back into silence broken only by the prison room’s roaring flame and Liri’s broken tears. She rocked on her knees, clutching Orik’s severed head to her chest.

Shinya gave her space. They had just saved all of Sandpoint from a massacre. They could afford a rest.


	10. Spiderbang

Ameko and Shalo hustled all night to reach Brinewall Castle just before dawn. While the elf needed no sleep, Ameko was on her last legs and seconds away from passing out anytime she held a blink too long.

“Put out your light,” said Shalo.

“Right, right,” said Ameko, hoping they hadn’t had to repeat their request. She was having trouble recalling anything beyond the last thirty seconds of memory.

She stayed close behind Shalo as they snuck up along the treeline to the castle on the cliff. The elf scaled the castle wall alone, lowering a rope from the top. Ameko winced as she climbed the rope, each scuff of boot against stone sounding ungodly loud.

The open courtyard below, however, remained still and quiet. Its hard-packed earth contained clumps of tough-looking weeds, furrows in the ground made by taloned feet, and chalky white mounds of dung the size of human heads.

“Looks like we’re clear,” she whispered.

Shalo, however, kept narrowed eyes on the watchtower. “You go down first. If they raise the alarm, I’ll handle the watch and you run inside.”

That sounded like a solid plan. Ameko tried to nod like a normal, awake person. She grabbed the rope and began the fifteen-foot descent.

Halfway down, her sweaty, sleep-deprived fingers lost all their grip. Her eyes went wide, mouth opening in shock as she felt nothing but air in her hands and at her back. She smacked the ground butt-first.

“Oof!”

A bell clanged strident in the darkness before dawn. Shalo fired three arrows through the watchtower window. It was too late.

The creaky wooden doors of a stable opened to the courtyard. Out stalked a six-foot, two-hundred pound ettercap. The purple-skinned aberration walked on two legs but had the face of a spider and sickle-shaped claws for hands. He was followed by none other than an actual, six-foot, two-hundred pound giant hunting spider.

“Ameko!” Shalo shouted as she scrambled to her feet.

The elf grabbed the rope. A whistling arrow shot through the fibers. They fell to the courtyard into a landing roll.

The ettercap and his spider blasted the two intruders with unconscionably strong, sticky web. The thick, gluey net pinned Ameko and Shalo to the barren earth.

A winged, feathered woman with taloned hands and feet landed noiselessly in the courtyard beside the spiderfolk. The harpy put away her bow and approached upon the captive intruders with the ettercap and spider, grinning wide and viciously.

The ettercap grabbed and spun Ameko, spewing her from head to waist with long, gluey cords of web. He cocooned her entire upper body, blindfolding and gagging her as well as pinioning her arms straight down her sides. Her fingers clawed uselessly at either hip, feet kicking the air.

The spider gave Shalo the same cocooning treatment. It tossed the kicking, squirming elf back onto the webbed earth. The sticky cords bound to each other, leaving Shalo mobile only from the waist down. Which was exactly what the harpy wanted.

She flapped up and into a reverse cow-girl straddle over Shalo’s hips. She yanked down their pants and took the elf’s cock between her feathered lips. The harpy licked and sucked them erect before squeezing their dick up her anus and riding the elf like bucking bronco.

The ettercap crushed Ameko’s cocooned back to his chest with one arm. His free sickle-hand ripped through her pants. He drove his knobbly purple cock up her asshole. The gagging web muffled the squirming girl’s scream.

The spider caught her kicking legs by the thighs. It forced them apart and shoved its hard, chitin-plated dick up Ameko’s pussy.

Spider and master pistoned together into the girl shrieking and writhing in the crush between their bodies. With the shared wall of her ass and pussy squished thin by their shaft-stuffing cocks, they could feel every rough thrust and grind of the other’s dick.

The girl’s rawed cunt and anus spasmed and clenched around the ettercap and his pet’s dicks. With a chittering squawk, master and spider clutched each other’s plated arms around the rigidly quivering flesh pocket between them. They came as one into their bound cumdump’s ass and pussy.

The mute harpy riding the elf threw back her head, her back arching and taloned feet clenching furrows into the earth. Her convulsing, squeezing anus milked the seed from her helpless cocktoy’s dick. She continued to buck and grope at her own feathered tits until her ravenous anus had sucked up every last drop of elven cum.


	11. Bitch of the Hound

Tsuto was startled awake at dawn by a set of the world’s rudest bronze bells. They had they gaul to be off-key and out-of-synch to boot. When his ratty but free pillow proved too thin to muffle the gods-awful clangor, he stormed out of bed, naked save for the pillow bent around his pointed ears.

“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted at Saul and his four meatheads all gathered under the Goblin’s bronze dome in their pjs.

“What?” Saul shouted back. The dumb bellringing was even worse here in the main gambling hall.

“Gahhh!” He kicked open the door and took his naked storm outside.

Every roof on the street was a-clatter under a hail of tiny black rocks falling from a perfectly clear dawn sky. Tsuto shifted aside. A porous little rock smashed to black smithereens where he’d just been standing.

“What the fuck?”

He stepped out of the way of a second, larger rock. A third, even larger and heavier, convinced him to step back into the shelter of the bell-ringing Goblin. Not a moment too soon.

The falling rocks increased in size and strength. They smashed shingles, ripped through awnings, and clobbered every poor fool who remained outside. In addition to clanging Tsuto and the other gambling hall employees into a skull-splitting headache.

The hail stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving several dozen casualties on the streets of the Wharf District alone and hundreds of gold in damages to ships and property. Tsuto stepped back out into the cold morning air, his head still ringing and spinning.

He crouched down close enough to poke at the stone remains. They felt like freezing cold granite. And evaporated into nothingness.

Tsuto’s head jerked toward the street. No, it hadn’t been his prodding. Every rock, regardless of size, had simply vanished into thin air.

An icy shiver descended his spine. He tilted his head back to his shoulders. That weird, inexplicable Blot in the sky seemed to be looking right back down at him. Tsuto wasn’t one for superstition, but he couldn’t help take something on this scale as a sign of future shit to hit the fan.

“One hundred weeks ‘til I pay back that debt, one hundred shitty more weeks…”

It occurred to him just how long one hundred weeks might be under constant threat of heavens unknown.

#*#*#*#*

Shinya drifted in and out of sleep, never long enough to fall into the nightmares of Orik’s death and the barghest, but enough to feel the cloying, skin-prickling heat of the star-prison’s arcane flames. They jerked awake and sweating against the wall of the ancient throne room. They glanced immediately at the prison door.

Shinya silently thanked the North Star that it was still closed. The flick of a feline tail caught their eye. Liri, awake as well, sat cross-legged under the wooden table. Skippy sat facing her, her tail waving like an undulating metronome.

Somehow, they were communicating. That was...good. Liri needed someone right now, and Shinya was just too much of a stranger to be any help in the grief department. It probably didn’t help that they’d been obviously attracted to the man she was in love with and torn apart before her very eyes.

Footsteps echoed across the stone, two humanoid and four clawed. Nula, alive and well, was followed through the darkness by a muscular, hairless canine standing four feet at the shoulder.

Shinya, Liri, and Skippy froze. Nula was coming for the barghest. There was nowhere to hide, at least not for long. So Shinya did the dumb and only thing they could do.

As their childhood friend passed their hiding spot, Shinya sprang into attack. Their katana slashed a deep, red arc across Nula’s exposed back.

The aasimar screamed in pain, drawing her bastard sword as she whirled to face them. “You!”

Her violet eyes and star medallion glowed dark and burning. The yeth hound at her side let up an ear-piercing howl.

Raw, abject terror surged through every fiber of Shinya’s body. They forgot Nula. They forgot Liri. They forgot themself. They dropped their katana and ran.

The yeth hound pounced into flight. His paws slammed into Shinya’s back, taking them down. Possessed by his supernatural fear, Shinya shrieked and sobbed under the hound, their sweating fingers scrabbling uselessly for a grip on the marble floor.

“Teach that meddling bitch a lesson, Scoob!” Nula snarled, healing her grievous wound by the unholy might of Lamashtu.

The hound howled and obeyed. Keeping Shinya pinned under his forepaws, his clawed hindpaws tore through their pants and straddled their flopping legs. Scoob shoved his dick up Shinya’s anus, his fist-sized knot battering their asshole.

As his cock pistoned Shinya’s walls apart, his knot beat harder and faster against his bitch’s twitching hole until finally wedging through with a soft, sweaty pop. Scoob’s knotted, mounted bitch screamed in tandem with his own, triumphant, raping howl. Their body flailed in convulsing, jerking and writhing against his underbelly as their knotted anus clamped shut around their new master’s dick.

The yeth hound’s burning, eldritch cum burst up his bitch’s anus. Shinya’s eyes rolled to the back of their skull, drool oozing from the corners of their mouth. Their knotted, mounted body, fucked into mindless animal rut, moaned and bucked under their canine master to milk him for every last drop of cum.

Scoob, heated and vigored by the Mother of Monster’s own breeding instinct, would remain knotted for over an hour. He continued to rape and relentlessly pump his bitch full of demonic seed until he’d fucked the consciousness from their body and then some.


	12. Un-Immaculate Conception

Shizu woke from dreams of flight fully rested in their creche. They stood, Xuzu alighting from their stalagmite perch on raven-black wings, sending the glowing motes swirling and dancing around them. The new witch’s eyes, black and darker than black, met their familiar’s.

A bridge of crackling, arcane heat blazed open between them. An hour passed in seeming seconds of burning, sweeping tide of eldritch knowledge. Shizu was flooded to the brim with spells and hexes, every fine hair charged and standing on end.

They had never felt such power in their entire life. A slow smile spread across their face. It was time to try that second tunnel.

Shizu grabbed their bow and levitated up into the darkness, Xuzu aloft on silent wings behind them. The tunnel let out into the end of the stone room that had partially collapsed through it. From within resounded low grunts and the slap of flesh upon flesh.

Shizu peered through the jagged hole into a dungeon holding three cells of iron bars. A filthy nest of a bed laid heaped in the middle of the room beside a half-eaten giant centipede the size of a horse.

The room’s only prisoner was a blonde Ulfen woman with blue tattoos on her naked, dirt-caked body. She bounced limp and semi-conscious on the massive, veiny cock of the ten-foot, six-hundred pound ogre guard. 

The ogre’s python-thick, apish arms pinned her back to their chest and hands groping her tits and pussy. They squatted on stumpy, meaty legs as they barreled their giant dick up their captive’s tight, tiny anus.

Shizu’s mouth twisted into a snarl of disgust. They fixed the giant with their evil eye and fired a warning shot. Into the ogre’s neck.

The ogre roared in pain and dropped the woman, cum spewing from their erect dick onto her back and hair. They ripped the arrow out from their thickly muscled neck.

No matter. Shizu followed it with a second arrow straight to the ogre’s unprotected eye.

Bloodied, bellowing, and furious, the ogre charged across the dungeon in two steps. They swung at levitating archer with a massive greatclub.

Shizu timed their floating dodge. The club whooshed through the air inches over the curve of their side and shoulder. The ogre’s moment took them whooshing after it. And plummeting down into the caverns below.

“Oh yeah, they’re dead,” said Xuzu.

“Good.” Shizu hopped down onto the ledge of the dungeon and jogged over to the collapsed Ulfen woman. “I’m Shizu. Are you alright?”

“Will be,” she croaked, crawling up onto her hands and knees. “Kela Gormundr. You escaping? Or killing?”

Shizu glanced back at the collapsed hole. When they were at their captors’ mercy, they’d wanted nothing more than escape. But circumstances had quite recently, dramatically changed.

“I have a few scores to settle.”

“Good,” grunted Kela, stalking toward the gear heaped in the dungeon corner. “So do I.”

“Glad to see everyone’s ready to throw hands,” squawked Xuzu, “because guess who’s coming out to play?”

Ten tentacles snaked out from the hole in the wall.

Shizu’s fingers, flying on wings of adrenaline, fired off two arrows into the monstrous head-body of the half-fiend decapus. The creature roared and slammed its tentacles at Shizu.

All but two glanced off the witch’s warding magic armor. Those two tentacles, however, tipped with claws, raked deep, bloody gashes across their chest and stomach.

“Fuck your fugly face you bat-winged bitch!”

Kela, armored and wielding, tore across the dungeon in a barbarian’s rage. She plunged her longsword straight into the monster’s opened mouth.

The creature screamed, spouting blood, and whipped its tentacles across its own face to beat and claw at Kela. 

So deep was the Ulfen in her rage that she took no notice of the blows. She swung her sword up through the base of its upper jaw and ripped the blade out through its agony-twisted face.

Shizu, a grin painted black on their blood-splattered face, shot two more arrows through the decapus’ writhing mass of tentacles into its face gash. They sunk to the fletching into the monster’s brain.

The decapus collapsed on the tunnel ledge. It teetered only for a second before plunging dead back into the darkness.

Kela staggered to Shizu’s side, catching herself by clapping a hand on the Tian-Min’s shoulder. Her vengeant smile mirrored the archer’s own. A storm of butterflies erupted in Shizu’s stomach.

#*#*#*#*

When Scoob finally popped his diminished knot from Shinya’s ass with a soft pop, Nula tied their hands behind their back, yanked them off the puddle of their cum, and marched them back to the dungeons with her demonic claw around their neck.

As soon as they walked through the rust-stained door by the throne room stairwell, Shinya’s skin erupted into such violent prickling that they feared it would tear right off their flesh. Their entire body felt plunged into acid, every fiber breaking down...but sticking back together, in new, weird formations.

Stone fonts of dark, frothy water sat on either side of the door, twin banks of stone pillars following their lines down the long chamber. Nula licked her lips and marched Shinya down to the stone dais at their end. 

Hanging braziers lit the chamber’s end with glowing red smoke, throwing carvings of countless monsters feasting on fleeing humans into lurid relief. An altar of black marble laid at the feet of a ten-foot statue. The sculpture depicted a very pregnant wiedling a kukri in either taloned hand. She had a reptilian tail, taloned feet, and the snarling head of a three-eyed jackal with a forked tongue.

Though Shinya couldn’t place the demon lord, especially in their current, semi-conscious state, this was Lamashtu, Mother of Monsters. What even the stupified changeling could see, however, was flicker of fiery orange light in one of kukri and the glow of cold blue radiance from the other.

The Mother of Perversion’s priestess slammed Shinya back-first onto the altartop. Stars burst in their eyes as the back of their skull banged the stone. Their stunned body went limp and immobile.

Nula climbed onto the altar, straddling their hips. She spoke in a husky, cooing voice as she rubbed their dick to stiffness with her cunt. “Your brother Tsuto gave me the best dicking in all the Lost Coast, but that bastard refused to get me pregnant. No matter, now that Grandmother Nightmare has sent you falling into my lap. Now, now, old friend, don’t cry. We’re going to make a monster.”

“No, Nula, please,” they whimpered, tears leaking down either side of their face.

Their pleading only spread a savage grin across the aasimar’s face. She seized Shinya’s throat with her talon, chuckling as their eyes bulged in choking. She reached down with her other hand and grabbed hold of their cock, placing its head against the puffed lips of her pussy.

Nula wedged her cocktoy into her wet pussy with a soft gasp. She wiggled herself down the full length of Shinya’s dick, impaling herself to the hilt. She rocked on their hips, squealing as she forced their dick, pounding into the mouth of her own womb.

Her fleshy walls squeezed wet, hot, and wringing around Shinya’s tortured dick. The changeling whimpered and sobbed to no avail. Shameful, perverted pleasure exploded from their cock all the way to their prickling scalp. Cum burst from their head into their ex-childhood friend’s ravenous womb.

The cleric screamed, throwing back her head and tits in orgasmic convulsion. Her clenching pussy milked Shinya of every last drop of seed, sucking them deep into demon-blessed abyss of her womb.

Grunting and gasping, she dragged her sweating flesh from her fuckmeat’s. She laid beside them on the altar, holding her trembling legs to her chest to secure their stolen seed inside her. The priestess let the back of her head rest against the unholy marble, her mouth curving with a weary smile.

They’d made a monster.


	13. The Rescuers

Nula left Shinya to the mercy of her yeth hound, which was none after watching his mistress leave her musk all over the changeling’s crotch. Scoob sprang onto the altar right after her and shoved his dick knot-deep into the quivering flesh of the well-used fuckmeat’s ass.

Shinya, drained and utterly spent by the aasimar’s monstrous babymaking rape, had no strength whatsover to resist the hound’s animal lust or their own. They laid beneath the beast, wracking and writhing in shameful, perverse pleasure from their anus clamped around his gut-slamming knot.

The changed changeling moaned lewd and aloud. The yeth hound jackhammered their bucking ass into the altartop, banging their skull against the stone. Just when Shinya could take no more, their anal walls clenched to bursting, the sound of flying steel whistled through the air.

Scoob turned his head toward the source, far too late. Orik’s bastard sword sliced a clean red line through his neck. Then the sword whipped back, reversing its spin to return to the hand of the apprentice who’d cast it.

Blood burst between the hound’s severed head and neck, cum exploding from his twitching cock into Shinya’s anus. Scoob’s head fell, bouncing down the altar steps. Liri, her newly learned invisibility broken by the attack, ran up after it.

Shinya burst into shamed tears at the sight of her. Ignoring them, she eased the beast’s still-swollen knot and dick from their asshole and pushed the dog’s corpse off the altar.

“Shhh, it’s gonna be okay,” said Liri, gently rolling them onto their side. Her dagger snicked through the bonds around their wrists. “Here, I have your gear. You get dressed, then we sneak the fuck out of here.”

Shinya sat up and wiped their eyes on their forearm. “Th-the goblins…”

“What about the goblins?”

“We should...kill as many as we can,” they sniffed.

Skippy, walking figure-eights between their naked legs meowed in agreement. Liri, however, frowned.

“Are you up for that?”

Shinya took hold of their katana. From deep within their gut, the first seed of eldritch power flared to life. The edges of their mouth curled with the faintest trace of a smile. “Weirdly enough, I am.”

#*#*#*

Miles to the marshland in the east, Shinya’s sister Ameko webbed from the head to the waist was being fucked on the throne room floor by a yamabushi tengu in corvid form. One of Kikonu’s four dire corbie actors clawed a hole in the web over her mouth and promptly shoved their cock into her throat.

Ameko’s body jerked like a landed fish as she choked, anus equally constricting around Kikonu’s bright red dick. The oni held her down against the floor by her web-bound tits and pistoned into the tight squeeze of her flesh. Her hips bucked against his, back arching between him, the floor, and the corbie dick pounding her throat as she was forced into helpless, orgasmic convulsion.

Corvid cum exploded into the cum toilet’s throat and anus. Then twin arrowheads exploded through the throat of the crow banging her head. The dire corbie toppled to the ground.

Kikonu and the three corbie actors raping the web-bound Shalo snapped their heads toward the source.

Kela roared from the shadows and charged forth in a barbaric rage. Two arrows sailed over her shoulder, sinking into the head and chest of a second corbie. Shizu smiled mirthlessly at the oni from the darkness, a raven of even darker plumage perched upon their shoulder.

The rattled Kikonu pried his eyes from the Abyssal raven just in time to fly up and away from the Ulfen’s savage swing. He swung back at her with the sickle and ball of his kusarigama, but the slice and bash barely phased the woman in her rage.

“Nevaki!” he screeched, his voice carrying down the hall of stone. In his mind, he reached out to the mute harpy oracle of Pazuzu.

Kela bellowed in vicious frustration as he flew out of reach. He screamed back, two arrows punching through the delicate flesh of one wing. The Ulfen cut down his remaining actors as he cast blur upon himself in desperate defense.

“Kikonu! I’m coming!” yelled the bird-brained priestess. She ran right through the door and into the violent, waiting arms of the barbarian.

“Gods damn it!” the oni cursed, Shizu’s arrows zipping harmlessly through his blurred form. His eldritch regeneration eased the burn in his pinged wing.

The yamabushi tengu flew at Shizu, swinging his kusarigama from sickle-end to iron ball. Much to his surprise, the blade and crushing head glanced off armoring magic in the changeling’s aura.

They fixed him with an evil, dead-black eye. “Get poxed, motherfucker.”

Raw, itching pox pustules erupted from under every inch of the oni’s skin. Kikonu screamed and scratched, his beautiful black feathers falling from him in droves.

The mute harpy flew through the door, two flaming arrows nocked to her longbow. She snarled at the evil-eyed changeling and let them fly. They too, whistled harmlessly off the witch’s warding mage armor.

“A little help, Kela?” Shizu shouted over the throne room clangor. They fired off two more arrows at the slowly regenerating oni, but they sailed through a blurred after-image.

The kusarigama’s iron ball bashed against their cheek. Stars burst in their eyes. They grunted as pain lanced through their back, a flaming arrow buried deep in their flesh.

Shizu blinked hard through instinctive tears of pain and turned their bow from oni to harpy. Their arrow sent her reeling, but Kikonu’s sickle slashed through their thigh, sending them to their knees.

The harpy’s flaming arrow tore through Shizu’s shoulder. They screamed in pain. And watched as three arrows not their own buried into the harpy’s feathered chest.

She plummeted to the throne room floor as Shalo rose fully to their feet, escaped from their bonds of web. The elf turned a cold eye onto the yamabushi tengu, followed by three arrows.

“Regeneration! He has regeneration,” Shizu hissed, pulling the extinguished arrow from their back with Xuzu’s help.

“The flaming arrows!” Shalo shouted back, their missiles chasing the flying oni across the throne room ceiling.

The weak, bloodied archer crawled to the harpy’s corpse. They pulled her last enchanted arrow from her quiver. It shook in their red-slicked hands.

“Now! Shoot him, now!” cried the elf.

“I don’t think I can!”

Xuzu alighted back onto their shoulder. Heat spread from their talons into their arms. The witch’s fingers steadied on bow and arrow.

“Of course you can. Now rip that oni a new one,” quoth the raven.

Shizu let the flaming arrow fly. The missile, guided by their spell of striking magic, pierced through Kikonu’s ribcage into his black, oni heart.

The yamabushi tengu burst into flame, blazing feathers molting from his bright red skin. He fell to the ground, burning all the way to white, crumbling ash.

Kela flumped to a seat beside the equally dead corbie priestess. Sweat ran in rivulets down her face and tattooed arms.

Shalo walked over to Ameko, Shizu crawling and staggering after them. By the time they’d reached the elf, they’d cut their sister free of her cocooning web. The two siblings fell sobbing into each other’s arms.

After a few moments, their breaths and feelings steadied. The two pulled apart. Shizu sat on their knees, but Ameko rose from hers, a hungry glint in her sloe-black eyes.

“What? What is it?” asked Shizu.

“I came here to save you, but now that we’re both saved...Shizu, our grandfather locked something away in this castle’s vault. We have to find it.”

Such was their elder sister’s conviction that Shizu dared not question it. They nodded, pensively, but pushed up to their feet. “I’ll help, but I don’t know how much more fighting I can take.”

“Leave the combat to me,” said Shalo, now fully geared up.

“And me,” grinned Kela, back on her feet once more.

“Great,” Shizu croaked, as though they had a choice.


	14. The Raid of the Goblin

Tsuto spent the morning helping Saul recruit new dealers, waiters, and greeters mostly by soliciting beggars off the street. Thankfully, the Gold Goblin had a large washroom and uniforms aplenty. Tsuto donned that of a card dealer himself for work that night.

Just as he’d predicted, it was a long, shitty slog of a night after such a long, early morning. It only passed thanks to the pitying generosity of customers deep in their cups who bought him drinks while their luck held.

He was done, beyond done, by closing hours. While the new recruits ushered and/or carried out the last of the drunks and began to clean their stations, Tsuto headed upstairs to his cramped quarters in the back. A face not his own flashed in the hallway window.

Crash! Glass broke from the windows downstairs. The new bouncers yelled in alarm. At the same time, the window at the end of the hall was jimmied open from the outside. A masked thief poked their head through the window over a loaded shortbow.

Their arrow flew down at Tsuto. The half-elf was already on the move. The back of his palm struck the arrow out of flight. His heel spun into attack, whipping into the thief’s temple.

Two thieves behind the caved-in first stabbed at him with rapiers through the window.

“Ow, fuck!” Though to be fair, the blows of these barely trained street rats were little more than the pricking of needles.

Tsuto’s punch crushed the throat of the first. He followed by snapping the neck of the second. Leaving the dispatched bodies hanging in and out of the window, he ran back to the stairs-end of the hall.

And nearly into a heavily pierced half-orc backed by two masked, non-pierced half-orcs. Only that the pierced half-orc shifted aside as swift as a leaf on the river.

As swift as this monk was, he was also completely shirtless. Tsuto slammed a vicious punch into his chest, ribs cracking under his knuckles, and an uppercut to the jaw.

The monk roared and punched back, his followers shooting arrows from behind him. The narrow stairway hampered their aim, but the monk was wholly unencumbered, Tsuto staggering back under his blows.

The flurry of blows left him bruised and smarting. There was a free window behind him. It’d be a simple matter to hop out into the alley behind. He doubted this pierced monk had been sent for him.

Sobbed screams from the gambling hall below derailed his train of fleeing thought. It boded ill. 

Tsuto sighed and fixed his gaze back on the half-orc. “Whatever happens, just remember it’s nothing personal.”

He sprang forth in blur of attack, fists pounding the living shit out of Ol’ Piercy. The half-orc dropped in a broken, leaking heap.

An arrow thunked into the wooden wall by Tsuto’s head. The half-elf turned the second to the floor. He leapt into a flying kick smashing the first archer into the second. He surfed their toppling bodies down the stairway, leaving them in a twisted rug at its foot.

The four new bouncers were either unconscious or dead on the floor of the gambling hall. Most of the new staff had fled, easy come, easy go, as they said. But one young Varisian half-elf hadn’t been so lucky.

Five masked miscreants had caught and stripped her, baring her dark, olive skin. They’d bent her double, tying her wrists to her ankles and elbows to her knees in a humiliating crab tie. She’d had no way to resist them as they forced her back flat onto a card table and parted her legs in an aerial V.

Their half-orc leader went first while the others gathered around, fluffing their cocks while they waited their turn. She grabbed hold of the girl’s thighs, fingers digging into her soft flesh, and shoved her cock into the half-elf’s virgin pussy.

The brunette screamed, her lashed arms and legs flailing uselessly on either side of the half-orc woman’s thrusting hips. Her rapist laughed and plunged her cock deeper up the half-elf’s tight, virgin shaft, tearing her wet, fleshy walls apart.

The girl’s hazel brown eyes bulged in pain, tears and snot running down the sides of her face. The half-orc grabbed hold of the luscious globes of her tits. Groping and twisting, she jackhammered the girl right in virgin lips of her womb.

Electric heat exploded from the half-elf’s clenched shaft out to her curling fingers and up the curve of her arching back. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, drool running from the corners of her mouth.

The half-orc grunted, her dick swollen to bursting with cum. Whack! A blurred knife-hand snapped her neck from behind. She crumpled, seed spewing from dick.

With their leader fallen, the four masked miscreants scattered, but Tsuto was a whirlwind of violence. He left two more forever broken on the gambling hall floor by the time the others had reached the doors.

Whatever, he could always kill them if they came back. For now, he drew a dagger and slashed through the crying half-elf's ropes. He helped her sit up. She leaned into him, shaking silently against his shoulder and chest.

"Hey now, it's gonna be alright. I'm Tsuto Kaijitsu, at your service. What's your name?"

"Mardu...you hired me."

"Ah, so I did." She was somehow markedly less noticeable as a filthy beggar on the streetside than she was now, cleaner and removed of all extraneous trappings. "I don't suppose any terms could entice you to stay on after tonight?"

"Just as long as you can promise me this isn't a regular thing. I-I could really use the room and board. I'm waiting to get accepted with the cyphermages."

The word meant nothing to Tsuto, but the poor girl was in no condition to know that. He smiled and nodded encouragingly. "How long have you been waiting?"

"Six months. It's, um, a long application process."

Thankfully, Saul and his four hulking bodyguards came down from his office, sparing Tsuto any more confusion. The owner's face was dark with frowning consternation. It lightened just enough to shoot the half-elf half a smile.

"Good work, partner. But it seems Zincher and Croat put aside their differences to pull this one, two of the biggest crimelords in the city."

"Seems they're still holding your past against you."

"No matter. Word of their failure's already spreading through the city, I guarantee it. It'll be more than enough to make them think twice before messing with us again."

"So, what, we just keep operating as though this never happened?"

"You're a bright one, Honeycock. That's why I hired you."

It was Mardu's turn to wrinkle her brow in confusion. Tsuto shrugged and slipped away as nonchalantly as he could without explanation to add the dead's loot to his debt repayment plan.


	15. Wrath, Greed, and Pride

As Shinya and Liri snuck up from the dungeons and back into the goblin’s wooden stockade, they passed two goblins in a room playing cards and another six asleep in the barracks. Shinya killed them all, Liri assisting with a grimace. Each snuffed out life fed the new, strange flame inside the secret changeling, but the real test came when Skippy reported the throne room up ahead.

Once more, Thistletop’s warchief, three best commandos, warchanter, and gecko were within its wooden hold. Skippy also reported that they could sneak to the courtyard without entering the room. Shinya shook their head, the shadows of the dark hall hiding their small, dark smile.

“We go to the throne room. We take them by surprise, and they’ll never be a threat to Sandpoint again.”

Liri couldn’t argue with that, but her frown only deepened.

They did sneak in from behind the throne, the apprentice newly invisible and Shinya in the darkness. At this time of night, the goblins were eating, drinking, and revelling around the charred corpse still roasting over a shallow fire pit. It was far too burnt to tell if it belonged to a fellow goblin or some larger, dismembered being.

It began with a spell of grease, sending all but the gecko slipping into their cups around the fire. So Shinya went for their bestial rapist first. Their katana sliced through its neck like melted butter.

The warchanter took up a screeching chant from the floor. Shinya buried their katana into her chest, ending her song with a gurgle. 

At the same time, Liri sent Orik’s bastard sword wheeling through the air. It slashed the warchief’s arms and legs each time he tried to rise, sending him back onto his squashed green face again and again until he bled out from his wounds.

By that time, Shinya had made short, bloody work of the commandos, their katana simply chopping them to pieces. They looked across the slaughter over at Liri, a bubble of laughter on their lips.

Her dark stare killed it instantly.

“Liri…”

“Let’s just go, Shinya.” She opened the throne room door. 

Drawn by the scent of cooked flesh and fresh blood, the four goblin dogs without rushed in, directly into the apprentice. Liri screamed.

“Liri!”

But the open commotion drew the four guards from the watchtowers. Shinya had slain but a single dog when the goblins rushed them. For all the Tian-Min’s newfound strength and fire, they couldn’t be in two places at once.

As they hacked their attackers to pieces, the dogs tore Liri and her defending cat to pieces as well. Shinya’s vision blurred first with tears then with pure, unadulterated wrath.

#*#*#*#*

It turned out there weren’t merely corbies infesting Brinewall Castle but reptilian troglodytes, too, and a huge ogrekin in a chef’s hat. Thankfully, Shalo and Kela’s combined battle prowess took care of the lot of them. What Ameko didn’t see were any hordes of undead, not that she was complaining.

Eventually, they found a stairwell descending down to a small, stone antechamber barring further passage with an iron portcullis, its metal teeth sunken deep into the floor and ceiling. The wall cramped beside it held a circular depression faintly inscribed with an image of the moon.

“Fuck! Now we’ve gotta go back and search all those bodies for the stupid key,” Ameko grumbled.

“Maybe not.” Shizu pulled a small, circular crest from their pack. Even if it hadn’t been radiant with magic, its depiction of the castle at night clearly marked it as the key.

Ameko inhaled sharp, her pulse pounding as the portcullis slowly ground through the floor. The room beyond was spattered with ancient bloodstains and deep, violent gouges. Deep drifts of dust heaped across the floor while immense stone doors hung ajar at its end.

Before she could hop through, the dust swirled into the air. It coalesced into the shadowy form of an old but handsome Tian-Min. The wraith took up a defensive pose, a familiar katana held menacingly before him. 

There was no mistaking the planes and angles of that narrow face, so similar to her father’s. As for the katana, she’d seen the very same in Shinya’s own hands, right down to that warding stance in the Kaijitsu Manor’s training room.

“Rokuro,” she gasped, “Grandfather!”

The wraith’s glowing red eyes flared at the words. He froze, then lowered his sword. He opened his mouth, speaking words in mournful Tian. “I...know you. My granddaughter, my grandchild.”

His arms rose with an anguished cry. Tears of dust ran down his incorporeal cheeks. “Take the Seal...take the Seal...it is no longer safe…!”

The wraith’s voice rose into a scream of ear-piercing agony. Whether by grief, pain, or some other unliving force, his form of dust was torn apart and whipped from the room by a violent storm of wind.

Ameko, Shizu, Shalo, and Kela, lowered their face-guarding arms and shared a glance in the ensuing silence. Without a word, Ameko stepped over the retracted gate and walked straight to the doors. The vault beyond was only half-excavated, three darkwood chests bound in bronze sitting against a rough cavern wall.

Only the center chest blazed with a geyser of magic. It popped open at the slightest touch. Within was the much smaller, simply fashioned warding box exuding all that power.

“Ameko, wait!” said Shizu, running in after her.

But Ameko could not wait. The box, no, the Seal inside the box, called to her. The world went black.

Ameko and Shizu stood side by side upon a battlefield. An army of terrible fiends with burning skin and sharp tusks wearing foreign armor and weaponry emerged from a vast, billowing forest. They descended amidst lightning, rain, and hail upon the siblings and past to the border villages of Minkai.

The Kaijitsus were swept away to the quiet gardens of an imperial palace. Young Amatatsu Shigure, Emperor of Minkai stood over a simply fashioned well. He smiled at a friend by his side.

This friend transformed without warning, growing three times in size and sheathed in a suit of enchanted jade armor. The jade warrior drew their katana, striking Shigure in the same, fluid draw. Blood flecked Ameko and Shizu’s faces. The emperor toppled in two pieces down into the depths of the well.

Then they were falling, falling, and floating into the wooden shop of an Ulfen merchant in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. Fyn Snaevald was the name, and the young Tian-Min handing over the enchanted katana Sushen was none other than their grandfather. Only his name was not Rokuro Kaijitsu at this point in time. It was Amatatsu Tsutoku.

The vision broke apart in a showering curtain of gold. As the coins rolled past, the siblings found themselves once more in the imperial palace in the city of Kasai. Ameko rose from the arms of a jade throne dressed in the finery of an empress. Shizu knelt by her side, their body bending by will of the vision into a deferential bow.

The visions passed in the span of the heartbeat. In the blink of an eye, the two stood once more in the castle vault. Ameko snapped the warding box shut over the dragon statuette inside. The oni army of Five Storms would have sensed the immense surge of magic from the Amatatsu Seal. It was likely they already had.

She turned back to the others, warding box in hand and a hungry glint in her eye. “Do you realize what this means, Shizu? We have to return to Minkai. We have to save our homeland from that oni usurper on the throne.”

The throne that was rightfully hers.

Shizu nodded numbly, still reeling from the flood of unleashed magic. What they’d seen was a vision of destiny. But a future of bowing their sister was not one that they could ever accept.


	16. ...And Sloth, That's Right!

Shinya didn’t remember the long walk home, in fact, they never made it back to the Kaijitsu Manor. Their feet led them back to the family glassworks instead. In their benumbed daze, they nodded at the still, glass-preserved corpse of their father but continued to walk, drawn by a flicker of heat.

They found themself in a basement office which they had never before entered. Judging by the empty bottles clustered on every hard surface and maps of Sandpoint tacked across the walls, their brother Tsuto had used this as his planning room in the days before the goblin attack. Days that now seemed impossibly distant, from the past lifetime of some half-remembered stranger.

Shinya’s forehead dropped against the stone wall. It was hot. The hairs rose on the back of their neck. They grabbed maps by the handful and ripped them off the walls.

The stone bricks blurred and sharpened before the Tian-Min’s very eyes. A door. There was a secret door, hidden by magic, here in the Glassworks. It swung soundlessly outward at their slightest touch.

The temperature only ratcheted up as Shinya followed the long tunnel from the basement through the bedrock beneath Sandpoint. Rough stone walls gave way to fine masonry. Even in their stupefied state, they couldn’t miss the similarity to the ancient chambers beneath Thistletop.

The tunnel, now narrow but high and vaulted corridor, ended before red marble doors carved with strange, spiky runes. Before them stood a statue of that same marble, her face twisted with unmitigated fury. The queen wore flowing robes, her long mane aloft by an intricate web of hooks and blades. Her left hand clutched a tome, the face of which was inscribed with a seven-pointed star. Her right hand grasped a glittering metal and ivory ranseur in attack.

Runelord...that was what Liri had called these ancient rulers. She had to be one of them. Whatever her likeness guarded behind those red doors had to be the source of this near-unbearable heat.

Shinya walked around the statue and set both hands against the doors. Whack! Their eyes rolled to the back of their ranseur-clubbed head. They collapsed unconscious at the foot of the doors and the room’s silent guardian.

The ranseur-wielding creature was a hairless humanoid lurching on back-bent, dog-like legs. Its split, toothy maw was flanked by tiny arms with three-fingered hands like those of a crustacean. 

The sinspawn crouched beside the would-be intruder. It tilted its oblong head, lidless red eyes glowing with curiosity. This one had been touched by Lamashtu, one of the many demon lords who served its master and progenitor, the pure sin of Wrath. The wrathspawn hefted their limp body over its shoulder and carried Shinya through the great marble doors.

#*#*#*#*

Ameko, Shalo, Shizu, and Kela finally settled down and made camp within the throne room of the conquered Brinewall Castle. Almost settled down. With the elf on watch, Ameko passed out the minute she closed her eyes. Sleep did not come so easily to Shizu.

They sat up in the darkness, hunched over their knees. Every time they closed their eyes they saw themself bowing at their sister’s feet once more. They groaned under their breath.

A calloused hand touched their shoulder. Shizu raised their head. Their eyes met Kela’s, her eyes as blue as the tattoos whorling across her naked body. The woman’s cheeks and lips were flushed and her nipples as hard and round as pink pearls.

Shizu took her hand. The two rushed barefoot out from the throne room, oblivious to Shalo’s impassive glance. Kela shoved Shizu against the unyielding stone wall, devouring their slender neck in heated kisses.

The changeling let out a soft, pleasured whimper as they fumbled with their newly looted belt. As soon as they got it unbuckled, the Ulfen pushed her mouth into Shizu’s and yanked the belt free of their pants. Their sucking, moaning kiss sent heat shooting through Shizu’s body like an entire quiverful of arrows.

They broke apart, drawing ragged breath. Kela spun Shizu to face the wall, crushing their tits flat to the stone. She bent their arms behind their back, binding them tight forearm to forearm. Shoving her hand between their thighs, Kela groped Shizu’s cunt and rubbed their clit until the Tian-Min was mewling against the wall, slick dribbling from their puffed pussy lips into the Ulfen’s hand.

The woman grinned and removed her hand from Shizu’s awakened cunt. She forced the whining youth onto their knees and twisted their bound, kneeling body just enough to step over one shoulder and shove her own dripping cunt in their face. Kela kept her bitch’s face pressed to her crotch until they’d tongued her pussy into spasms.

The Ulfen ground her clit into Shizu’s mouth. Her pussy convulsed in orgasm around their hot, prodding tongue. She came with a high cry, squirting into Shizu’s face.

She stepped her leg back behind her marked, kneeling bitch. With a rough, upside kiss, Kela dragged Shizu back up the wall until their feet dangling off the floor. She pinned them against the stone with a forearm against their middle back and shoved her fist into their begging pussy.

Shizu screamed, knees and toes banging the wall as their dangling legs kicked and shuddered at their thick impalement. Keeping their guts cinched to the wall, Kela pistoned her fist all the way to helpless inner mouth of Shizu’s womb. Their screams choked to a mindless gurgled, their legs continuing to twitch and jerk like a hanged man’s.

The Ulfen woman pounded them harder, faster into the wall, her wedged fist ripping their pussy walls apart. Shizu’s tits and forehead smacked against the stone as they bucked and writhed on Kela’s arm. Their wet, rawed pussy clamped in a deathgrip around the Ulfen.

Shizu screamed, their bound, pinned body arching back into rigid quivering convulsions. They came again and again onto Kela’s brutal fisting, the mouth of their womb sucking like a true bitch at her knuckles.

When Kela finally took them off the wall, Shizu slumped limp in her strong, muscled arms. The Ulfen let out a low chuckle and kissed the top of their head. She freed their arms from their own belt and set them down on their wobbling legs.

“Thanks for the fuck,” she grinned. “You wanna head back to bed?”

Despite their weariness, Shizu smiled and shook their head. “I need a moment.”

With a shrug and parting ass-slap, Kela returned to the throne room. The changeling leaned back against the wall they’d just been fucked into and slid all the way to the floor into a huddle over their knees. Two black, clawed feet alighted on their shoulder. Shizu and Xuzu sat for a long time in silence.

“Xuzu…”

“I know. I see what you see, I feel what you feel.”

So they knew. They knew Shizu wanted no part of the family destiny written in their own blood. 

“Any witch powers that can change my fate?” they scoffed, half-jokingly, half-bitterly.

“Not any of yours, newbie, but the Witch Queen’s, sure.”

“The Witch Queen?”

“Baba Yaga, Queen of the Witches. In this world, she reigns in Irrisen up north toward the Lands of the Linnorm Kings.”

“Would the Witch Queen even want to help me?”

“Yeah...you’d need to make a real serious case for yourself.”

One by one, the worries drained from the maelstrom in Shizu’s head and heart. However small it was, there was a chance to change their fate. If travelling to Irrisen and getting the Witch Queen’s attention was what it took, that was exactly what they would do.

#*#*#*#*

As dawn broke the morning after the raid on the Gold Goblin, Saul’s prediction that the failed raid would increase the Goblin’s visibility and prestige in Riddleport proved right on the money. All kinds of outlandish rumors circulated, bringing a smarmy smile to the faces of the owner and his bodyguards. Some claimed the raiders had been disguised gendarme officers or even direct agents of the city’s ruling Overlord Cromark.

The overlord themself was forced to come out and publicly denounce the raid on the Goblin by jealous and petty criminals. They assured Riddleport that they hadn’t lent the army to matters best governed by the city’s lords. Which was worded cryptically enough to raise Tsuto’s eyebrow, but Saul only laughed.

“That Cromark, always a hoot.” Saul, behind his desk, waved his hook dismissively. “Anywho, my contacts tell me Croat and Zincher are working toward something even bigger. I want you to go sniff out the details. The meeting’s at twilight in the Boneyard, a place called the Spar.”

He pushed a city map, folded so that the mass graveyard was front and center, across the desk.

“Sure,” said Tsuto. It was paying the bill after all. “Anything else I should know?”

“Don’t get caught.”

“Righty-o, sir.”


	17. Twin Resolve

Shalo, Shizu, and Kela let Ameko sleep in until noon, gods knew she needed it. She woke to the smell of meat sizzling in a skillet. The three were gathered around the throne room’s fireplace, Shizu and Kela backseat driving the elf’s barbecue. Ameko stumbled over to join them with a sleepy grin.

Everyone was ready to head out after the noonday brunch. They’d not taken two steps out into the courtyard, however, when Shizu suddenly froze in front of Ameko, who walked right into her younger sibling.

“Woah, sorry, everything okay?” she asked.

Their eyes, one black, one utterly black and both darkly sober, met hers. “I can’t go back to Sandpoint with you.”

“What?! What the Hells are you talking about?! You were there! You saw that vision, too! Minkai needs us! There’s a fucking oni of the Five Storms playing pretend emperor in our home country!” Ameko took a deep, steadying breath. “And besides, Shinya’s gotta be worried sick about us. We have to get back as soon as possible.”

And then pack and get on the first caravan east, technically northeast.

“Apologize to Shinya for me, then. I have business concerning our mother to deal with.”

“Our...your mom?”

“She’s a hag, a literal hag, and she’s made me a witch, presumably to join her coven someday.”

“Oh…” There really wasn’t anything Ameko could say to that info bomb. As a bard whose magic came to her spontaneously, she’d never had any experience with magic patrons, covens, and such. “What-what do I tell Shinya? Or even Dad?”

“Tell them truth.”

There was a weirdly unbirdlike squawking from Shizu’s new pet raven. No, their witch familiar. That made much more sense.

“What’s your familiar saying?”

Shizu raised their eyes to the sky, one hand shading them from the sun. Ameko followed their gaze. A dark but rapidly moving speck had appeared, growing larger by the second.

“They said Mom approved of my conviction and sent something to help me.”

“Sent what?”

There was a cawing from the sky. The full-sized black cloud overhead broke apart into hundreds of northern birds, ravens, hawks and more. They descended in a whirling, feathered cyclone down toward Shizu.

Ameko leapt back just as a cawing wall of wind and feather whooshed between her and her sibling. Shizu was swept into the air and into a closing ball of the birds. Their face, wide-eyed but resolute, was last she saw of them.

The flock wheeled away in a northeasterly direction and vanished over the castle battlements. Kela stepped up beside Ameko, brushing the feathers off her clothes and hair.

“They didn’t even say goodbye,” said the Ulfen woman.

“They never were much of a people person.”

“Shame. They were a great fuck.”

“O-kay, we’re going. Let’s go.”

#*#*#*#*

Shinya awoke within a huge room resembling an immense, underground cathedral carved entirely from red marble, its walls all carved with those same spiky runes. They tried to rise but found their limbs bound spread-eagled to marble spikes at the center of the room, each crowned with a polished humanoid skull. They could only lift their head to see a marble dais. 

An eldritch brew churned and bubbling from within it. White wisps flowed off the orange-glowing liquid and into the vast chamber. The cathedral was deathly cold save for the nearly unbearable heat from that pool.

A winged creature only eighteen inches tall, ram horns curling back from her red-scaled head flew into Shinya’s field of vision. She perched upon their naked chest, her lipless mouth spreading into a wide, needle-toothed grin.

“You must have a lot of questions,” she rasped, her low voice as rough as a grindstone.

“Y-yes! I do! Who are you? Where am I? What is this place? What is that bubbling thing in particular? What are you going to do to me?”

The tiny demon cackled. “My name is Eryu. Runelord Alaznist appointed me personally as guardian of these Catacombs of Wrath, which is where you are. She encouraged the veneration of my kind, demons, but our true faith is the Sin master of the demon lords, Wrath.

“Thus, she built this shrine to Wrath. That ‘bubbling thing’ there is a runewell of Wrath. It allows communication to other such runewells, among other things. If you wish it, you can experience one of those ‘other things,’ a baptism into power.”

“What power?”

“You were recently touched by a demon lord. Here,” she ran a clawed finger ever so gently down the length of their cock.

Much to Shinya’s burning shame, their dick stiffened immediately at the demon’s touch. Eryu’s grin grew impossibly wider.

“You gave your seed to Lamashtu and she gave you something back. I’m sure you’ve felt it by now.”

They gave a tight-lipped nod. That seed of heat and power inside them was the demon lord’s gift, an exchange for impregnating Nula. Shinya was half-queasy at the thought of it, but their throbbing dick wouldn’t quit.

“Lamashtu serves Wrath and so does her power. If you accept the baptism I offer, the seed of magic in you will blossom and flower. You will come into power the likes of which this world has not seen since the age of heroes.”

“What’s the catch?”

“There is no catch. You’ve already paid the price. Whatever came from here,” she drew her claw around the rim of their head, drawing a moan from their lips, “will grow into that same power I offer you now. It’s left to you to rival that power or simply...watch.”

With the blood actively draining from Shinya’s head to their cock, they knew they weren’t thinking straight. But they couldn’t let Nula’s demon rape baby grow into a monster that would probably wipe out Sandpoint if not more. 

A new heat simmered within them. Anger, or wrath as Eryu liked to call it. They simply couldn’t let any more innocents like Liri, Orik, and even motherfucking Skippy die. And they were damned if they would let those deaths go down in vain.

“Baptize me,” said Shinya, their voice as low as growl.

“As you wish,” rasped the demon. She turned her lashing tail and tiny asshole to them and sucked the head of their cock into her mouth.

Shinya moaned, reactively squirming in their bonds as Eryu licked, nibbled, and sucked their head while rubbing her scaly body up against the shaft of their dick. Just when their dick was ready to burst, the quasit flew up off them with a raspy cackle.

Shinya cried out in torment, the pulse in their cock throbbing like a blazing hammer against their belly.

Eryu spun in the air to face them. She floated down slowly, taking her cocktoy’s dick in her clawed hands and feet. Grunting and gasping, she worked their head into the ultra tight mouth of her tiny asshole.

The rim of Shinya’s head popped into place just inside the mouth of her anus. Eryu shrieked and screamed, hanging onto their shaft for dear life as her tiny, overstuffed body exploded into uncontrollable convulsions.

Shinya screamed with her, their mistress’ anus impossibly tight around their cock. With her anal spasms clenching her walls tighter, her little fleshy pocket wrang and squeezed the sperm from their dick.

Shinya’s cum burst into her asshole, filling her anus to the brim. Eryu’s belly swelled as though pregnant before her cocktoy had even finished cumming. So much seed pumped from their dick that the cum-filled demon was pushed off Shinya’s head and onto their belly, where the cum spewed onto Eryu’s back, wings, and horned head.

The sounds of ragged breath filled their ears. The wearied, seed-coated quasit pushed up onto her hands and knees. She licked the cum off Shinya and off herself like a cat. Once they were both clean, she sliced through Shinya’s bonds with a clawed finger.

The Tian-Min pushed resolutely to their feet. Without waiting for the demon’s direction, they walked right up to the low marble dais. The bubbling, churning runewell was carved in the shape of the seven-pointed star.

“Of course.”

Shinya stepped up onto the ledge and jumped into the well.


	18. Wererats at Twilight

Tsuto crept into the Boneyard at twilight. The brisk, autumn winds had died and a light mist rose from the marsh. A globe of light flickered around from a ship’s boom protruding from the surface of the water.

Three dark-cloaked humanoids with hairless, lashing tails huddled together in the muck beneath. The six-foot wererats let out hissing laughter and jeers around the prey between them.

Their poor victim, their mouth and asshole spitted on the dicks of two of the wererats, was a dark-skinned, Garundi elf. Their arms and legs splashed helplessly in the briny water beneath them, all four limbs bound together at the wrists and ankles. Their eyes, darkest violet, bulged in their skull as the wererats pistoned into their throat and anus, tearing their walls apart.

It was a bad situation to say the least. Tsuto tried to creep forward into the salt marsh, but tiny, skittering movement in the muck stopped them. Flesh-eating cockroaches swarmed between him and the wererats. The half-elf tried not to barf.

The wererat dick in the captive’s mouth slammed the back of their throat, forcing its constriction around the cock. At the elf’s other end, their anal shaft clamped shut around the second wererat dick, shunting their rapist’s battering head right into their g-spot.

The elf let out a choked, gurgling screech onto the cock in their mouth. Their long, lithe body bucked and writhed like a stag spitted alive from ass through to the mouth. Drool sputtered from their swollen lips as the captive succumbed to the orgasms raped into their taut ass.

Cum spurted from their own, traitorous dick into a shameful splat on their belly. Grunting and jeering, the two wererats unloaded into their pathetic cumtoilet, their seed exploding into the elf’s spasming throat and anus.

There was no time to waste. With a muttered curse, Tsuto drew his shortbow and fired an arrow into the darkness. It pierced through the third wererat’s skull, right under the ears.

The wererat plopped dead beneath the Spar with a mucky splatter. The raping wererats yanked their dicks out of the elf, letting their trussed body slop into the marsh beside their fallen companion.

They ran just outside the reach of the cockroaches and tossed tanglefoot bags at Tsuto from across the flesh-devouring swarm. The half-elf easily danced out of reach of the cumbersome projectiles.

The bags hit the briny waters, exploding into gluey masses strewn with chunks of reeking, rancid meat. The swarm, drawn by the stink of rotted flesh, split in two to attack either bag.

Tsuto raised his brows at the backfire. Not one to look a flesh-eating gift horse in the mouth, however, he dashed forward to unleash a flurry of bone-snapping blows upon a wererat.

The second turned tail and ran as the first dropped dead. Tsuto looked from the splashing, drowning elf to the fleeing wererat. He sighed and plucked the naked elf from the muck. With a quick flick of his knife, he cut through their bonds.

“Thanks,” they croaked, straightening to a willowy height a hand’s breadth over Tsuto’s. Their body, shivering in the cold, was covered in dark violet tattoos. “My name’s Kuva of the Shin Rakorath, and I...need to talk to you.”

“Trust me, I’m the last person you want playing therapist.”

The elf shook their head. “I know who you are, Tsuto Honeycock Kaijitsu. I have been investigating your recent employer, Saul Vancaskin.”

All the pieces, the past flurry of events, fell into place. “He’s not ‘going legit,’ is he?”

“No. The Shin Rakorath have reason to believe he’s been working with a renegade elf from Mierani, Depra of House Azrinae.”

“I see. And what exactly would happen should Saul be caught consorting with such a criminal?”

“I would take him back to face elven justice in the Mierani Forest. If convicted, he’ll be imprisoned there, likely for the rest of his life.”

And with that junior partner contract Tsuto had signed, the Gold Goblin would fallen into the half-elf’s hands. Not only would he be free of his debt, but he’d have a money-making operation immediately at his fingertips. He could here in Riddleport in drink, sex, and comfort for the rest of his days.

The half-elf flashed Kuva his most brilliant, winning smile. “How can I be of assistance?”


	19. A Learning Experience

A hand smacked down on the edge of the runewell, parting the wisps. A second hand followed, Shinya pulled themself up from the orange-glowing waters. A soft lambence radiating from within them, revealing their bones and organs so long as they were in contact with the Abyssal baptismal waters.

Once they climbed out, their inner glow faded but the feeling remained. Their body had somehow been fully broken down and rebuilt into a similar shape but entirely different composition. Every sense seemed sharper, enhanced, and sensitive to the heat of magic which blazed within this cathedral.

“How do you feel?” asked the quasit, hovering in the air on her bat-like wings.

“I feel...powerful,” said Shinya, their voice hushed in awe as though speaking too loudly could shatter this feeling like an illusion.

“Good,” said Eryu, “but power without knowledge is worse than cutting with a dull blade. Follow me.”

She led them to a staircase at the back of the cathedral. They followed her down the winding stairs into an oddly spherical chamber. A ragged book, a few scrolls, a bottle of wine, and a dead raven surrounded by a halo of floating and writhing maggots floated in the room, spinning lazily in space. Its curved walls were plated in sheets of strange red metal that rippled every once in a while with silent black electricity that coalesced into runes before breaking apart once more.

The room blazed with magic, a levitation spell cast by some mage far more powerful than Shinya and even Eryu. A second magical glow radiated from the tome.

Without waiting for the quasit’s direction, Shinya stepped over the threshold. They immediately floated up into the air with a delighted laugh. They swung their limbs as though swimming and closed the gap between them and the book.

Only to find that it was written in a language they didn’t understand. “Eryu, this is what I need to read, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t speak whatever language this is.”

“Abyssal, tongue of demons. I can teach you a spell for that or school you in Abyssal, if you want, but the book is absolutely necessary, child of Wrath.

“It’s a prayer book of Lamashtu, Mother of Monsters. It contains spells and knowledge of every monster you can think of, including illustrations of how they kill.”

“So, you’re going to be my mentor?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No! No, not at all. Thanks, Eryu. It really means a lot.”

“Anything for a fellow member of the faith,” she grinned.

Something about the way she said it sent an icy shiver down Shinya’s naked back. They had, perhaps, gotten themself into something they neither fully understood nor could ever fully escape, if they wanted too.

For now, Shinya took the tome under their arm and swam back down to the door. “When can we start?”

“Now.”

#*#*#*#*

Shizu couldn’t see anything as they floated on the whirling winds within the sphere of birds. They saw even less as the sun set and felt only a mounting coldness as the flock took them north.

The birds dispersed without warning. Shizu fell with a yelp into a bank of snow. They sat up, shivering violently in the bitter cold and darkness of Irrisen. All around were evergreen trees heavily laden with snow.

“Fuck! It’s cold.” They stood and shook off as much snow as they cold, drawing their leather duster as close as they could around them. “Xuzu, can you fly up and check for the nearest town, city, village, whatever?”

“There’s smoke coming from some big log house. It’s not far, but it’s across a bridge.”

Across a bridge didn’t sound so bad until Shizu saw it for themself. Made of rope and wooden planks, it spanned a plunging ravine. The boards were already covered in ice and snow, and it swayed alarmingly in the icy winds blowing through the gorge. Below, the turbulent waters surged through two successive waterfalls.

Shizu cursed and fixed their eyes on the large wooden lodge across the ravine. Smoke rose from not one but two snow-covered chimneys. With the promise of warmth a mere bridge away, they unclenched their stiff fingers from their duster and placed them on the rope railing.

They took a tentative step. The bridge creaked and swayed in the wind, their foot sliding on the slick plank. But their white-knuckled grip on the frigid, sodden ropes kept them upright.

With puffs of shaky breath, they took the second step, placing themself fully onto the bridge and at its mercy. The ropes held, creaked but held. Shizu clenched their chattering teeth and soldiered on.

Halfway across, Xuzu cawed in alert. Shizu looked up, the flapping of leathery blue wings formerly concealed by the howling winds. A horned, three-foot ice mephit snarled down at the witch and their familiar.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going? This is private property!” she shouted over the whipping wind.

“P-p-please,” they chattered, “let me in. I’ll d-d-die out here.”

The ice mephit cocked her head in thought for what seemed to be a frozen eternity. Then she straightened, a needle-toothed grin spreading wide across her narrow blue face.

“I’ll take you across but only as my prisoner.”

“I’m no f-f-fucking threat to you. Look at me! I’m practic-c-cally dead!”

“No. Surrender to me or I’ll knock you off the bridge and you can take your chances with the falls.”

“Don’t do it,” Xuzu hissed in their ear.

Shizu had to agree, but there was no way they could fumble their bow and arrows out under these conditions to take the mephit down before she knocked them off the bridge. The witch could levitate, but their useless fingers and chattering teeth would make it near impossible to cast any spells.

They blew out a shaky stream of fog. “F-f-fine! I surrender.”

Xuzu flew off their shoulder with a piercing caw and vanished into the darkness. The ice mephit descended to Shizu’s eye level. She blew out a fifteen-foot cone of ice, shaping it with her hands. 

The ice latched around Shizu’s throat in a collar and chain of frozen links. The ice mephit jerked the chain forward, yanking the trespasser to their knees. She tied the chain off to the rope railing for now and flew behind them.

Shizu swallowed down their instinctive urge to resist and let the mephit wrench their arms behind their back. She locked them together at the elbows and wrists in bands of solid ice. She formed two more bands around Shizu’s ankles and joined them by a bar of ice.

“Wait, how am I supposed to walk across?” Their voice rose in pitch from their mounting panic. This had been a bad idea, a grievously bad idea.

Their captor chuckled mirthlessly. “You’re not.”

Untying the chain, she dragged Shizu sliding across the boards. The changeling gasped and choked at the collar digging into their throat. Their lungs burned, but before they lost all consciousness, they’d reached the other side.

The mephit kicked open the door. With a final, violent yank, she sent Shizu falling face-first onto a giant, mercifully warm bear rug. Ass-up, arms bound, and tits to the rug, they couldn’t raise themself up, but they could still spot the taxidermied heads of elk and other cold climate game mounted on the walls of this trophy room.

As the mephit slammed the door against the frozen world outside, Shizu caught the sound of several pairs of boots on the floorboards.

“What’s this, Izo?” asked a low, gravelly voice heavy with authority. 

Shizu turned their head to the side, flattening their cheek into the thick fur of the bear rug. The speaker was a rugged-faced Irrisen with a shock of dark brown hair whose skin was as pale as Kela’s. A group of five humans and half-orcs stood in a semi-circle behind him.

“It’s whatever you want it to be,” Izo cackled raucously, giving Shizu a swift kick in the ribs.

The mephit’s prisoner grunted in painful protest. “Please, I just wanted out of the cold for the night. I don’t mean you any harm. I’ll be out by first light.”

The leader crouched down, shaking his with a small, dark smile on his lips. He grabbed them by the hair and pulled their head painfully off the rug to meet his eyes. 

“You’re a real dumbfuck, aren’t ya?” He chuckled, though whether at his own remark or at Shizu’s predicament was unclear. Likely both. “Good thing we don’t need any brains from you.”

He yanked, drawing Shizu all the way to their bar-shackled feet with a sharp cry. At the same time, Izo pulled their frozen leash down, forcing them to bend at the waist. She tied the chain off around the spreader bar, locking them into their surrendered, submissive position.

“No! Stop! Let me go! Ngnhhh…!”

The ice mephit gagged Shizu’s cries by grabbing their head by the sides and shoving her cunt into their protesting mouth. As they choked and sputtered on Izo’s cold, blue pussy, the leader of the lodge pulled their duster aside and yanked the trousers off their rounded ass. He groped and slapped the soft flesh of their asscheeks.

“Looks like we’ve got us a prime sex slave, Sentinels,” he laughed. Undoing his own pants, he grabbed and spread their cheeks, shoving his dick into their exposed asshole.

Shizu let out a muffled shriek into Izo’s cunt, their body jerking helplessly against the rigid bands of ice. All the Sentinels laughed and jeered, whipping out their own dicks while their leader raped their anus. His cock tore their cold-clenched walls apart to beat a pounding rhythm into their guts.

Tears ran from the new sex slave’s eyes, followed by huffs of snot from their nose. Their whimpers and cried only urged the leader’s cock to piston harder, faster, and deeper up their anus. In seconds, his dick was ramming Shizu right in the g-spot, forcing their anal shaft to clamp tight around his cock.

Shizu gurgled, their traitorous hips bucking into his at the slow build of feral heat and pleasure from their squeezing anus.

“Look at this pathetic slut go!” said the leader.

“They want it, Karcin! They want it bad!” laughed a Sentinel.

“Izo, get off this whore. It’s time to stuff and mount ‘em.”

The mephit flapped off, finishing herself by shoving her fist up her own swollen cunt. Without pulling his cock from Shizu’s anus, Karcin dropped to the rug with his cockwhore’s body shuddering atop his. Izo released the chain from the bar.

A Sentinel pushed Shizu back and straddled their fluid-coated face. They wedged their dick and balls into their sloppy mouth and raped the new sex slave to the back of their throat.

As they choked on cock and balls, another Sentinel straddled their hips. The half-orc rammed his cock up Shizu’s pussy, already taut to breaking by the dick battering their anus to a raw, swollen pulp.

With garbled, nasal screams, the Sentinel’s new cumdump writhed in frozen bonds and against the bodies crushing and impaling their flesh. Shizu’s toes curled, fingers grasping senselessly as the Sentinels’ cocks pounded spasm after spasm of white hot feeling lancing from their stuffed holes to every inch of their quivering flesh.

The laughter and jeers drained away from Shizu’s perception, their world narrowed to the bursts of uncontrollable pain and pleasure from their stuffed throat, anus, and pussy. Their eyes rolled to the back of their head in true, utter surrender.

The Sentinels’ cum exploded from their cocks into their broken cumslut’s throat, anus, and pussy. They pulled out, letting the last drops splatter on their bitch’s sloppy face and seed-leaking holes.

Shizu gasped for air like a landed fish, their generous chest rising and falling with ragged breath. But the Sentinels weren’t finished with their new sex slave. There were still three members who hadn’t yet marked their property.

Shizu let out a helpless, strangled sob as the next three approached. They shut their eyes as though they could shut out their horrific reality. It was a pitiful, useless defense against a night of bondage and endless rape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, failure at a critical juncture leads to an entire chain of failures


	20. The Brutal Life of a Slave

After the first two rounds of gang rape, the sweaty, panting Shizu was drained of every last ounce of their strength. Their limp body could offer no resistance as Izo sublimated their bonds of ice into vapor and the Sentinels stripped their body of all gear.

They replaced their bonds with coils of rope, binding Shizu’s arms behind them with palms together as though in prayer. More ropes over and under their tits forced their arms tight against their torso. They tied their legs together at the thighs, knees and ankles, trussing their slave like a worm.

One Sentinel ran to the kitchen and came back with a shallow bowl of milk. They placed it on the floor on the other side of the bear rug.

“Come here you little cumslut. I bet you’re hungry as fuck after all that...fucking.” 

The Sentinels laughed. Shizu, their chest, neck, and face aflame with shame, squirmed in the tight ropes biting into their flesh and slowly inched across the rug. Hot, stinking fluid splashed onto their naked back and hair.

Their spectating masters were pissing on them. Shizu didn’t think they had the fluid left to cry, but there came the tears, burning in humiliation. It was too much. They froze in their worming tracks, curling into a bound, huddled ball.

“Awww, the little cumslut needs encouragement,” Karcin cooed mockingly. “Izo, would you?”

Without a word of warning, the ice mephit punched her fist up Shizu’s swollen anus. The Tian-Min screamed, eyes bulging in their skull.

“Move it, you worthless piece of fuckmeat,” she snarled, slamming her fist again and again into the slave’s rawed, sensitive anal walls.

Sobbing hoarsely, Shizu forced their helplessly trussed body back to worming and squirming across the seemingly endless stretch of rug. Izo kept up the fisted assault in their ass, freezing them here and there with bursts of electric convulsion.

The Sentinels’ bitch was drooling by the time they reached the end of the rug, but they’d done it. Shizu dropped their face into the bowl of milk, lowkey hoping to drown themself in it. The dish was too shallow, however, and merely splashed their filthy, sticky face with a new fluid coating.

Izo yanked out her fist, drawing a sharp hiss from Shizu. They were a fool to expect any relief. The Sentinels came upon them as they lapped up the milk as fast as they could.

They were forced from their belly onto their knees. The Sentinels bound their legs again, thigh to calf. More coils drew the ropes around their sides tight to the ropes around their legs, forcing Shizu into a ball of helpless, naked flesh.

“Time for the main course, cumdump.” Karcin kicked the nearly empty dish aside. He squatted down in front of his slave and pushed their head down onto his re-arisen cock, spearing them to the back of their throat.

Shizu choked and sputtered up milky spit as their head master pistoned into their ravaged throat.

“Boss, can we breed this bitch?” asked a half-orc squatting down behind the slave’s bouncing ass.

“Why not? Pregnant sluts fuck the best.”

With a vicious round of laughter from the leering Sentinels, the half-orc grabbed Shizu’s balled up body by the ropes frog-tying their legs and shoved their newly turgid cock up the slave’s puffy, oversensitized pussy.

Shizu, choked on cock from both ends, immediately jerked into uncontrollable rigid quivering. Their entire mind blanked out until they were nothing but an unthinking ball of raped, climaxing flesh between Karcin and the sentinel.

They pierced the air with the nasal squeal of a spit-roasted sow, throat and pussy clamping tight around the Sentinel cocks ripping through their shafts. Karcin’s cum exploded in their mouth, the half-orc’s gushing right into the changeling’s helpless womb.

The slave’s masters pulled out of their twitching holes, each giving Shizu’s soiled body a sharp, parting kick. Their cumtoilet’s bound, lewd flesh jerked in both pain and lingering orgasm. The Sentinels’ seed slopped from their swollen slit and half-open mouth.

“Oh no, it’s coming out,” said the half-orc in mock concern.

“Let’s just pump this cumslut so full of sperm their pussy won’t know which way is up.”

“Have at it, Sentinels,” Karcin chuckled.

Rough hands grabbed Shizu by the ropes, pulling them tight and biting into their balled up body. They were flung onto their bound arms and back on a wooden dining table. Their feet twitched uselessly in the air.

The four other Sentinels lined up to plow their dicks up Shizu’s pussy and rape their battered womb full of seed. Izo descended from above onto the slave’s filthied face. She ground her mound into their mouth, gagging their hoarse cries and screams once more.

After stuffing the cum toilet’s womb full to bursting with their sperm, the ice mephit crafted two massive dildos of ice each as long and thick as a forearm. She forced the freezing ice up the slave’s still-spasming pussy and anus in a doubly penetrating plug.

Shizu’s balled body rocked in mindless convulsion around the shaft-stuffing plugs, the tongue lolling from their mouth like that of a truly broken bitch. 

With a cruel, jeering cackle, Izo reformed the ice collar and leash. She handed the end of the ice-link chain to Karcin, who gave it a sharp yank.

The slave was dragged by the neck off the table, their side smacking the table’s bench before landing hard on the trophy room floor. They moaned, pussy and anus instinctively clenching tight around the massive plugs.

“What a whore.”

“Fucking slut.”

“Chain ‘em up!”

Karcin did just that, wrapping the chain around a wooden support column until Shizu’s neck was bound against it, their body still balled up over their knees. Izo snapped her fingers. The warmth of magic bled out from the wedged dildos as they began to piston erratically in the slave’s pussy and anal shafts.

Despite Shizu’s broken voice, they still managed weak, pathetic cries as their tortured body was forced into continual orgasm.

“This horny bitch doesn’t know how to shut up.”

“That’s an easy fix.” The Sentinel wadded up Shizu’s underwear and stuffed the fabric into their mouth for a more long-term gag.

Another pulled a rough sack over the cumdump’s head, drawing it closed just above their frozen collar. The Sentinels left their slave there for the night, bagged, bound, plugged and chained to the pillar with easy access to their helpless mouth, pussy, and asshole for those who came for a midnight snack.


	21. A Mounted Approach

Karcin was one who came to snack at midnight. There was something about that slave, something that he felt some primal need to possess. And he knew the only way to do so was to break them off from every last shred of their humanity.

The Sentinel who’d last visited them had left the cum toilet with both dildos pistoning in their painfully stretched anus. Slick and cum oozed from the swollen, reddened lips of their pussy.

A low growl built at the back of Karcin’s throat at their exposed humiliation. He pushed their back against the pillar and untied the ropes around their trembling legs. He bound one ankle to the pillar over their head and then the other, further exposing both lewd, twitching holes.

He untied the sack and ripped it off their head. The gagged slave stared sightlessly through him. Without the makeshift hood, he could hear their muffled, feral grunts. He yanked the wad of sodden fabric from their mouth.

“Who are you?”

The slave could only grunt and huff, saliva dripping from the corners of their reddened mouth. 

Karcin slapped them across the face. “Who are you?”

They whimpered. Then shuddered against the pillar, their feet jerking uselessly over their head as their flesh wracked with orgasm.

With a deep, frustrated growl, the leader of the Sentinels picked them up by their quivering hips and shoved his cock into their red, ultra-sensitized pussy.

Shizu half-screamed, half-moaned in a dry, broken voice. Their eyes found Karcin’s, pupils dilating as their pussy clamped down around his cock and the two dildos churning their anus to a pulp.

Karcin moaned at their tight, wet grip on his dick, enhanced by the two dildos grinding against his cock on the other side of the cumslut’s pussy wall. The heat, pressure, and squeeze was ungodly. He came with a deep, guttural groan.

His eyes met his slave’s as he pumped their sucking womb full of his cum. There was a ghost of a smile at the corners of their swollen, well-used mouth. For some strange reason, Karcin had the sinking suspicion that it had been him who had been defeated.


	22. Murder in the Morning

Tsuto crept back into the Gold Goblin with Kuva on his heels. It was well after three in the morning, when he could soundly count on Saul and his bodyguards being asleep. He turned toward the stairs, mind on the office upstairs, but the elf, sniffing the air, padded off in the direction of the wine cellar.

The half-elf shrugged and followed the full-elf down the steps. The funk in the cellar itself was strong enough to make Tsuto recoil, eyes watering as though they’d taken a real punch to the nose.

“Who died in here? And who failed to clean it up?” As junior partner/future owner, he sure as Hells would dock their pay if he ever found out.

“It’s troglodyte musk,” said Kuva, crouching low to the ground. They crept toward floorboards that looked no different from the others, but when they rapped their knuckles against the wood, the sound was hollow. “We’ve found the door. All we need now is to find the key.”

The image of Saul’s key-shaped prosthetic flashed in Tsuto’s mind. There was no way in fuck he’d manage to get that off the man without alerting or waking someone. Then again, he didn’t need to.

“Allow me.” He retrieved a set of masterwork thieves’ tools from his pocket.

The trap door opened to a strong wooden ladder that descended into a lightless cavern. Kuva frowned at the darkness as they lit a torch.

“There goes the element of surprise.”

The half-elf waved his hand dismissively. “Surprise is overrated.”

He did, however, let the elf go down down first. The sound of snoring reached them through the tunnels before they caught sight of the sleepers and vice versa. 

Kuva held the flaming end of the torch close to the ground and drew a dagger in the other hand. Tsuto shook his head. That little pin-pricker wasn’t going to do anyone any good. He stepped in front of the elf and snuck toward the snores.

On the rough floor of a cave, hides had been spread to form a filthy bedding for its occupants. Food scraps and empty wine bottles littered the bedding, on which slept five reptilian humanoids stinking up the cavern with their thick, cloying musk. They’d obviously passed out in a drunken stupor.

Kuva crouched by the nearest troglodyte, dagger in hand. They slit the reptilian’s throat.

Tsuto’s brows shot up at the elf’s unexpectedly cold-blooded attack. He said nothing, however, allowing Kuva to do as they bloody well pleased with the troglodytes. Once all five were bleeding out, they jerked their pointed chin at him in a sharp nod.

“Moving on, then,” said Tsuto. Though he wouldn’t admit it even to himself, he was too shocked to stop and loot the murdered wine thieves.

#*#*#*#*

The first light of dawn had not yet broken the northern autumn darkness when a knock sounded against the Sentinel lodge’s front door. A Sentinel threw a wooden tankard of ale at the ice mephit.

“Izo, you were supposed to be watching the bridge, ya dumb blue cunt!”

“So I got carried away! Who’d of thought we’d get two visitors in one night?”

Ice mephit wore a two-way dildo in a frozen strap-on. One end was wedged to the hilt in her tiny anus, distending her stomach with its oversized length and girth. She was pistoning the other end into the near-catatonic sex slave’s wildly twitching anus.

The Sentinels had re-bound their cumdump on their tits and knees on the wooden bench of the longtable. Shizu’s head dangled off the edge, allowing a half-orc to plow their throat with their dick. The slave’s wrists were locked against the outside of either ankle by tight, frozen cuffs. Only the rough, biting ropes kept their exhausted, shuddering flesh bound to the top of the bench.

Shizu had cried their eyes dry, but their pussy, now stuffed with both of Izo’s pounding dildos continued to leak slick onto their kneeling legs and feet. The frozen collar remained around their neck, the chain in the hand of the half-orc. They pulled it taut, choking the cumtoilet out to constrict their throat around their large green dick.

At the other end, their pussy and anus constricted around all three raping dildos. With a deep, groaning sigh, Izo pulled her strap-on free of the tight suck of the slave’s spasming anus and flew to the window. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew out a sharp whistle.

The five Sentinels pulled themselves together, Karcin storming into the room with a gauntleted hand on his hilt. The knock rapped again. Izo opened the door to a seven-strong team of guards from the nearby village of Waldsby.

“An odd hour to call,” said Karcin, his voice booming with authority, “but the Sentinels humbly offer you fine soldiers of Waldsby our hospitality. What can we do for you so very early this morning?”

“We’ve been sent by Lord Rasek himself to investigate signs of unlicensed witchcraft.” The guard captain’s glacial blue eyes narrowed on the naked and brutally used Tian-Min bound to the longtable’s bench. “The foreigner comes with us.”

“No!” snapped Karcin. He tensed at the harshness of his own voice then ran a hand through his hair and began more calmly. “That is, the Tian isn’t a witch. They’re merely our slave.”

“We have our orders. Would you dare oppose Lord Rasek?” There was a slight but unmistakably threatening growl in the hulking Ulfen’s voice.

Karcin had nothing he could say to that. The captain jerked her chin at her team. The first two guards broke from the team and entered the lodge.

Karcin’s body moved with a will of its own. He grabbed his short sword and slashed at the passing guards with a feral roar. “Sentinels, attack!”

The lodge erupted into roaring, clanging combat. In the bloody chaos, no one noticed a raven descending from the shadows of the rafters.

“Shizu, hang on,” they quoth quietly. 

Xuzu pulled the ropes loose with their beak. They had no choice but to peck and jab at the frozen cuffs, but the clash of battle drowned out the breaking of ice.

Shizu’s weak, convulsing body toppled to the floor, gasping as pounding dildos bounced in their rawed, clenching pussy. They managed to fumble the raping sextoys out of their overstimulated cunt despite their numb fingers. They forced themself to their hands and knees and followed Xuzu in a crawl.

Their familiar took them to a storeroom, yanking Shizu’s gear and someone else’s cold weather clothes off the shelves. They dressed hastily and climbed to their feet using the shelves as support.

Shizu fell into a staggering run after Xuzu to the back door of the lodge. They didn’t look back, racing into the black northern morning and snow-laden forest.


	23. Lost Causes

Tsuto and Kuva continued down the tunnels to a cavern recently excavated at its eastern end where a massive, curved stone carving protruded from the floor, wall, and ceiling. It was covered in strangely familiar runes, some of them having been chipped away during the excavation. 

There was a table nearby cluttered with masonry tools and a thin, opened book. There was no sign of an elf, but as soon as their torchlight breached the cavern’s threshold, two four-foot, two-hundred-pound bloated demons came howling, gibbering, and bulldozed out from the shadows.

Tsuto swept into the cavern with a furious kick into the nearest dretch’s blubber. A crossbow shunked from somewhere in the darkness, the bolt whistling past his pointed ear. So there WAS someone else here.

A flurried blow of his fists sent the demon crashing loud and resounding to the cavern floor. Another bolt flew at him. Tsuto neatly sidestepped the projectile, his eyes following its trajectory to a point on the shadowed ceiling.

While Kuva tangled with the other dretch, he lit a torch of his own and held it aloft. An elven woman with dark purple skin and silvery white hair stood upside down on the ceiling as though under some gravity-defying spell. Her eyes, solid white voids, met Tsuto’s. She aimed her hand crossbow at him and fired again.

The bolt scratched his cheek as he bit the wood of the torch between his teeth. The half-elf drew his shortbow and fired up at her. The arrow glanced off her fine, mithral chainmail.

A second arrow and not his own shot through the darkness and into Depra’s thigh. The elf grunted through her clenched teeth and aimed her crossbow at Kuva.

The bolt ripped a shallow gash through their arm, but the insidious poison coating on its tip knocked the elf unconscious. They collapsed as though dead onto the cavern floor.

“Shit,” Tsuto cursed. He took his eyes off Depra only for a moment, but when he looked back, there was nothing but a cloud of magical darkness where the uncommonly pigmented elf had been.

He let out a deep sigh and stepped over his fallen companion en route to the workbench. Amidst the tool there was an adamantine chisel easily worth well over its weight in gold. As for the book, it appeared to be a handwritten journal in a language that was not Elven, not even close.

Kuva would likely know what was in it, whenever they had the good sense to wake up. Tsuto leaned back against the curved stone, running an idle hand over one of the massive glyphs. There was something so famil… 

“The Cyphergate!”

That huge stonework soaring over the entrance to Riddleport’s harbor must have been a ring that passed through the stone at either end of the harbor gate and travelled beneath the sea to complete its circuit. But what a renegade elf could want from an unmovable piece of ancient architecture, Tsuto truly had no idea.

#*#*#*#*

Thanks to their new fur coat, pants, and boots, Shizu was no longer deathly cold, but in their exhausted state, they still had no hope of surviving the black, frozen morning without shelter and rest. They staggered into the low, snow-laden boughs of a conifer.

“Come on, Shizu!” crowed Xuzu. “You have to keep walking! The village is only an hour away!”

The escaped slave was certain they’d heard the raven say that an hour ago. Then again, they could barely hear the howling, ice-cutting wind over the throbbing pulse in their ears. They lifted their head off the trunk, their face sticky with pine sap. But when they tried to push off the tree, the branches coiled sticky and tight around their arms from wrist to shoulder.

“Xuzu!”

Shizu had stumbled not into conifers but a pair of mated frost firs, six-foot-tall evergreen treants. The branches of the frost fir behind them seized around their legs from ankle to knee. 

The screaming, thrashing witch was yanked into the air, their limbs pulled up behind them, bending their back into a taut, painful arch. Their screams choked off as it became difficult to breath.

“Hold on! I’ll get help!” Xuzu cawed, flying off to the village.

An hour, any help would take an hour to arrive. Surging with adrenaline, Shizu jerked and writhed until their arms pulled free of the fur coat. Their upper body fell forward toward the snow below, pulling their legs from their tree-clutched boots.

Shizu dropped onto all fours in the snow sans coat and boots. But the frost firs were too territorial to allow the changeling to escape unpunished. A thick, sticky bough seized and cinched tight around their waist.

Shizu squealed out a yelp as the tree slammed their back against its trunk, pinning them upside down against itself. Its roots wrenched their arms around the other side of its trunk binding their forearms together against it. The witch’s fur-coated thighs fell against their chest, their bare feet dangling helplessly over the snow on either side of their head.

The second frost fir closed in, its trunk splitting in two to allow it to step forward and sealing closed once its bark was pressed up against the back of Shizu’s thighs, sandwiching them in their humiliating, upside-down bend between the treants.

Utterly helpless, Shizu couldn’t suppress a despairing whimper. Then the branch-arms of the second frost fir pushed their fur pants down to their knees, hobbling their useless legs even further. Their teeth chattered, their exposed flesh shivering violently in the frigid air.

The trees, apathetic to the trespasser’s plight, each sprouted a long, thick, resin-coated phallus. Shizu snorted out a nasal shriek as the sticky, girthy phalluses plunged into the exposed mouths of their pussy and anus. With the branch closed tight around their waist, every thrust pummeled deep into their clenched guts.

Shizu was too crushed and squished between the frost firs even to kick their pants-hobbled legs. Instead, their feet flailed pathetically in the air while their upside-down body jerked and squirmed against the rough bark of the trees’ bodies.

The frost firs picked up the pace, pistoning harder, faster, and deeper into their captive’s helpless, swollen shafts. Shizu’s back and hips banged against the trunk, their sensitized walls constricting tighter and tighter around the sap-coated phallus stretching them into sheets of rawed nerves.

Upside down, Shizu’s back arched, bowing against the rough trunk. Their eyes rolled to the back of their skull, the freezing cold forgotten as the frost fir phalluses slammed blast after blast of sheer white heat into their pussy and anus.

Their pinioned body wracked in helpless orgasm between the trees, slick and pine sap oozing down their mound onto their tightly clenched belly. Chattering, huffing, and squealing, Shizu’s rigid quivering flesh succumbed to spasm after spasm of brutal, gut-fucking orgasm.

With their mind broken by the frost firs’ merciless pounding in their convulsing pussy and anus, they had no perception of the winter-touched creature approaching on hoofed feet.

The blue-skinned forlarren was the product of a union between fiend and ice nymph. Their body was hairless like a nymph’s but they had the back-bent legs of a goat and heavy, dark blue horns.

“That’s enough,” Mirulan addressed the frost firs in Sylvan.

The snow-capped heads of the treants sagged, but the forlarren ranked above them in service to the Jadwiga, the winter witch ruling class of Irrisen. They came into their semi-conscious victim, filling their pussy and anus full of thick, resinous cum. Then released the changeling, as commanded.

The Tian-Min, clearly a foreigner, appeared half-dead with hypothermia and exhaustion. Their eyes, one black and the other solidly so, fluttered but could not fully open.

Mirulan dressed them in the fallen furs. Then trussed their arms behind them with their palms together to prevent spellcasting. This had to be the unlicensed witch Lord Rasek was looking for. Few outsiders ever came to this land cursed with eternal winter unless it concerned witchcraft.

The forlarren lashed the changeling’s legs together at the knees and ankles and hefted the bound foreigner over their shoulder. It was time to collect on a very generous bounty.


	24. Price of Admission

“Oh good, you’re awake,” said Tsuto, tossing Depra’s journal into the elf’s lap. “The renegade escaped about an hour ago, but she left that behind.”

Kuva blinked the drowsiness out of their eyes and flipped through the journal. They frowned at the contents.

“I couldn’t read it,” said the half-elf.

“Yes, it’s written in Undercommon, a language of the Darklands. It’s a ledger of sorts. She’s kept track of all the money she’s received from Saul along with her expenditures.

“Hmmm. Everything was shipped to some place called Devil’s Elbow.”

Tsuto shook his head. He’d never heard of it, but he doubted it could be too far from Riddleport without spending ridiculous amounts on transport.

“She’s also logged all the strange weather Riddleport’s been having,” Kuva continued. Their frown deepened. “Apparently they’re the ‘strange and eldritch side-effects from charging the glyphs on Devil’s Elbow.’ She theorizes they’ll vanish once ‘the glyphs are activated and the star is plucked.’ I’m not entirely sure what she means by that.”

“We can safely assume it’s nothing good.”

“True. I should get back and report this to my superiors. If Depra escaped, she may’ve warned Saul of your involvement in the investigation. I don’t think it’ll be safe for you to return to the Gold Goblin.”

Tsuto laughed breezily. “Danger is my middle name.”

“According to your records, ‘Honeycock’ is your middle name.”

“Same difference. Besides, I have an idea.”

#*#*#*#*

Mirulan carried Shizu not to the village of Waldsby but the castle belonging to its lord, the Pale Tower. The forlarren was gone and several thousand gold coins richer when Shizu awoke to warmth and first rays of morning light.

They tried to move only to find their body both naked and bent over a low, sturdy table. They were on their knees, thick leather straps belting either thigh to the legs of the table. Their hands were bound in prayer behind them by silken ropes. Another thick leather strap pinned their arms, tits, and torso flat against the tabletop.

Shizu’s eyes pricked as though they were going to cry again, but they simply had no more tears to shed. Instead, they raised their head as far as they could to take in this new torture chamber.

A translucent image of a globe hung suspended in midair, slowly rotating in place above a summoning circle in the blue-tiled floor. Lines of arcane energy glowed across the globe’s surface, faintly humming with power as they connected multiple endpoints in a radiant glow that illuminated the domed ceiling overhead. 

Many tables and shelves covered in books, maps, and large scrolls lined the circular walls. A large ornate mirror hung between two windows streaming the morning light into the chamber. Twin ice sculptures of demons flanked a bubbling cauldron opposite the mirror.

A tall man in regal fur robes with skin and hair as pale as snow sat at a desk opposite a willowy, slyph in diaphanous robes that revealed every inch of her blue-skinned body. The five-foot long, three-hundred pound mountain goat under the desk was the first to notice Shizu’s waking.

It snorted and crawled out, causing the man and woman to rise as well. They stopped at the foot of the table to which Shizu was inescapably belted against. The man’s mouth curled into a thin-lipped smirk. He bowed mockingly.

“Welcome, stranger. I am Lord Rasek of Waldsby. To what does our humble village owe the pleasure of an unlicensed witch?”

“I-I didn’t kn…!”

The noblewoman flew to their side of the table and cut Shizu off with a resounding smack to their cheek. “Introduce yourself first, you mannerless slut.”

“Speaking of, this Lady Jai,” said Rasek, wholly unphased by her violent outburst. He gestured with an open palm toward the large goat. “And this is Valst, my familiar.”

“N-nice to meet you,” Shizu began again, their voice lowered with caution. “My name is Shizu. I don’t mean anyone here any harm, but there’s someone here I need to find. How can I get a license and do this lawfully?”

“Who exactly do you need to find?” asked the sylph, her low voice laced with threat.

“My mother,” Shizu lied, not trusting either of their captors as far as they could throw them. Which, under present conditions, was completely impossible.

“Ah, of course,” said Rasek. “There comes a time in every changeling’s life when they’re compelled to seek out the mystery of their heritage, their...power.”

He fell silent, stroking his platinum bearded chin.

“And the license?”

Smack! Jai struck them across the face again, harder this time. “You’ll speak when spoken to, you worthless whore!”

Shizu’s cheek stung, a bruise forming under the skin. The humiliation sent a heated flush from their chest up their neck and into their cheeks.

“To earn a license, you must complete an apprenticeship under a licensed witch of Irrisen. Such as myself,” the Jadwiga smirked.

Shizu couldn’t suppress a glare at their noble captors. They had no doubt that an apprenticeship to Rasek would be no better than total, humiliating enslavement to him and his vicious cunt of a lady.

Jai didn’t like that. Her hand knotted in Shizu’s hair. She yanked, hard, drawing a sharp hiss from their mouth. The changeling refused to cry out.

“Just let me kill this haughty bitch,” she snarled with another sharp yank.

“Now, now, my darling. Let’s see what they have to say. Would you like an apprenticeship under me or not?”

Shizu’s glare deepened. Of course they did, these two weren’t giving them any choice but slavery or death. 

“I would, my lord,” they growled.

“You’re not worthy!” Jai practically screamed in their ear.

“Come now, Jai. This could be fun. We’ve never had an apprentice before. Why don’t we have Valst teach little Shizu their first lesson, hmmm?”

The sylph pouted but floated back across the table into Rasek’s waiting arms. At the same time, his huge goat familiar clopped to Shizu’s end of the table. Each hoof-fall sent their stomach sinking with dread and certainty.

Valst walked up behind the bent witch’s fully exposed ass, straddling their knelt legs with his hindlegs. He braced the hooves of his forelegs on either side of Shizu’s belted down back. The blunted head of a thick burning cock bumped the raw, sensitized mouth of their anus.

Shizu shoulders shook hysterically. The goat pushed his dick into their swollen, too-tight anus. They let out a hoarse scream that strangled off into tortured grunts as Valst ripped their anal walls apart and slammed their cunt into the hard, unyielding edge of the table.

Shizu’s head banged helplessly against the table as Valst rammed his dick into their g-spot, a burning hot knot larger than a fist battering spasms into the tiny mouth of their ass. The goat, grunting and snorting over his mounted bitch jackhammered their fuckhole until his knot wedged through into their hot, squeezing walls.

Stars burst in Shizu’s eyes, drool oozing from the corners of their mouth as their useless bound body wracked with convulsion against the hard table and the crushing, furred weight of the goat who’d mounted and knotted their anus. A clear fluid squirted from their grinding cunt onto the floor between their shamefully quivering legs.

The first pump of Valst’s seed burst into their tightly clamped anus. It was too much for the new apprentice. Their violently trembling body shuddered into a twitching, jerking unconsciousness, their helpless body like a ragdoll under the goat mounting and raping them. Knotted to his dick, he continued pumping their reactively squeezing flesh full of his cum until he’d forced his humiliated bitch to suck him dry of the last drop.

The winter witch Rasek, feeling each and every climax of his mounting familiar, pushed his wife face down against his desk and shoved his painfully stiffened cock in the sylph’s pussy. He held her down by the shoulders, fucking her with unusual violence. She squealed in ecstasy under him, but he barely heard her. In his mind, it was he who was knotted in that bound cumslut’s asshole, mounting and raping them into submission to his lust and pleasure.

Rasek moaned, his seed gushing into the wet squeeze of his wife’s pussy. He pulled out from her gasping, panting form but remained with Valst in his unconscious apprentice’s ultra tight, ultra sensitive anus. He smiled distantly, darkly. This looked like the start of a beautiful ownership.


	25. Shadow in the Sky

Tsuto opened the wine cellar trap door a crack. A low light filtered in from the room above, indicating someone’s presence, likely one of Saul’s bodyguards or more. He took a deep breath and threw the door up and open.

The single hulk of a bodyguard jumped in surprise. Before they could cry out, Tsuto grabbed hold of one ankle and yanked them down the trapdoor like a hunting spider. He let the bodyguard take the fifteen-foot-fall, landing with bone-breaking crash at the bottom of the cavern. He doubted anyone had heard anything with the thick wooden door shut, but he couldn’t be too careful.

After a minute had passed still and silent, the half-elf opened the door a crack once again. He climbed soundlessly into the cellar and snuck toward the wine cellar door. He placed his ear against the wood.

There were two voices out in the hall. Though hushed, he could still tell they didn’t belong to either of the three remaining bodyguards. Saul had hired rando mercenaries off the street to take him out. It was flattering, really.

And too bad for the randos. Tsuto slipped out from behind the door into a whirlwind of neck-snapping blows. The two guards slumped to unmoving heaps against either side of the narrow hall.

Staying low, he peeked out the window into the alley behind the Gold Goblin. Saul’s prized fighting boar prowled the alley in place of a watchdog. Tsuto wiped an imaginary tear from his eye at how thorough Saul had been. He’d really scared the living daylights out of his one-time employer.

Which meant the gambling hall itself had to be crawling with mercs above and below. Tsuto unlocked the window as quietly as he could. Moving slow and silent, he climbed up onto the windowsill and braced his feet against either side.

He pushed himself up straight, his hands reaching the ledge of the locked windowsill above. He pulled himself up, lightly jumping his feet into a higher bracing position to reach the window’s lock.

Tsuto jimmied it open, keeping his eyes on the two mercs in the upper hallway. He put the thieves’ tools away and took a deep breath. Gripping the ledge hard, he threw himself through the opening window and rolled to his feet into the hall.

The mercs at either end blinked in shock. The half-elf throat-punched the first, crushing their windpipe. The second ran, screaming “He’s up he…!”

A powerful kick snapped the merc’s spine. A lifeless corpse slid down the stairs to the gambling hall.

Three arrows were fired by three mercs on the catwalks over the hall. Tsuto dodged them easily by simply stepping out of the mouth of the staircase.

Footsteps approached from below while the door of Saul’s office cracked open at the end of the hall. Cursing under his breath, he stepped into a ready stance on the other side of the hall to funnel both parties toward him in manageable numbers.

Sure enough, the two bodyguards who charged out of the office ran right into the two mercs running up the stairs. Tsuto grabbed the nearest hostile, a merc, and used their own momentum to throw them out the unlocked window.

The bodyguards shoved the other merc back down the stairs. He tripped over the body of his fallen companion and went tumbling into a bone-breaking heap.

Tsuto landed two heavy blows against one bodyguard, sending him staggering back into the wall. The other slashed a deep red gash in his side with their scimitar.

The half-elf grit his teeth but turned away from the scimitar-wielding bodyguard to finish off the first. The blade bit deep into his arm. Deep enough that Tsuto caught it by the hilt.

He flipped the scimitar out of the bodyguard’s hand and into his own. As the hulking fellow’s eyes bulged in surprise, he stabbed the blade through their neck, burying it to the hilt. Wincing from the pain in his side, Tsuto kicked the bodyguard’s falling body down the stairs with the others.

He pressed one hand against his bleeding side and cupped the other around his mouth. “Come on out, Saul. Your guards got me good. Let me die looking into the eye of the man who killed me.”

The office door opened slowly. That hooked him, of course it had. There was nothing more rewarding than the defeat of a feared enemy, a personal bogeyman.

Tsuto slumped against the wall, grinning weakly as Saul and his final bodyguard walked out from the office. A much stronger smirk spread across Saul’s face as he took in the half-elf’s bloody, wounded form no longer able to hold itself upright.

Saul stopped in front of him and cast a glance down the stairwell. “You put up a good fight, as per usual, but nobody gets the better of Saul Vancaskin.”

“So it would seem. But before you kill me, would you do me the honor of indulging my curiosity? I just want to know why, Saul. Why did you do it? Why did you get back into crime?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Yes.”

Saul jerked his chin in a nod at his final bodyguard. The nigh-inhumanly jacked human grabbed the wounded half-elf’s arms and wrenched them behind his back. He snapped Tsuto’s wrists into heavy iron cuffs, grabbed the twink and marched him into Saul’s office. The bodyguard shoved him chest first onto the desk and yanked down his pants.

Tsuto hissed and grunted as the bodyguard shoved a long, girthy cock up his asshole. As the man pistoned his cock up the half-elf’s tight anal shaft, splitting his walls apart, Saul began to speak loudly over the feral noises and sweaty slap of flesh.

“The truth is...I’m just fucking good at what I fucking do. Crime doesn’t pay? Fuck that! Crime pays tenfold and then some. Son, my cup? Runneth over.” 

“And that elf babe Depra, she, well, House Azrinae, has got vision, real, true vision. Do you know how fucking rare that is?” Saul stopped to give Tsuto a chance to respond.

It was rather difficult with his anus impaled to the hilt on his rapist’s cock, the massively broad and muscled human knocking his hips, chest, and head against the desk with every jackhammering thrust. His anus, tortured and pleasured all the same, wall-ripping thrusts, clamped tight of its own volition around the human’s dick.

Tsuto managed no more than a gurgle, drooling onto Saul’s desktop. With a deep, low groan the bodyguard slammed the half-elf’s g-spot and gushed his hot, sticky load up his asshole.

Tsuto groaned in the same breath, his spine clenching as though to arch. The man’s large, solid hands crushing his shoulders to the desk, however, quashed his bucking and bowing to a writhing against the wood. Cum burst from his own cock, shamefully splattering his taut, narrow belly.

Saul let out a snort of laughter. “Yeah, that’s sounds about right you prime strip of…”

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! There came the sound of three bodies crashing to the floors from the catwalks. Despite his daze and the bruise blooming on his forehead, the half-elf’s mouth spread in a sloppy grin.

Saul hooked Tsuto by the lapels and dragged him up off the desk. “What the fuck have you done?!”

The office door burst open. Kuva stood in the doorway, two arrows aimed point-blank in Saul’s face and a razor-beaked hawk on their shoulder. Three more elves, all in the dark, lantern-inscribed uniforms of the Shin Rakorath had their back.

“Time’s up, Saul Vancaskin. Now come quietly, or run and die.”

The bodyguard, his sperm-dripping cock still exposed, raised his hands, backing down. Saul cursed and punched him in the tit, dropping Tsuto to the ground.

With a lock and twist of his legs, the half-elf sent his erstwhile boss sprawling to the floor with an “oof!” It was the last gasp of his fight, the sobering man slowly placing his hands on his head.

Tsuto stood, receiving a death-glare. He shrugged as best as he could with both hands cuffed behind his back.

“Ain’t I a stinker?”

“This isn’t the end, Honeycock. You mark my words.”

In truth, Tsuto would have written them off entirely if not for the flashing light from the window. Everyone still on their feet stared. Everyone all across the city of Riddleport.

Light arced down from the sky, a falling star on a southward course. It did not burn out but lengthen, the light hurtling directly at the city. 

Panic gripped the streets, but a moment later the falling star arced over the city and out to sea, trailing a smoky scar and clap of thunder. The star streaked south, reflected by the sea below. Out to sea, it struck the island of Devil’s Elbow. 

A strange, false dawn rose from the south, a brilliant blast of light consuming the horizon. A tremendous explosion rolled through Riddleport as it shook from a powerful earthquake. 

Everyone out on the street without Elven reflexes was knocked to the ground. Shingles crashed from the roofs. Sandpoint glass cracked in the windows of the affluent districts. An orange ball of fire rose into the sky on the horizon over Devil’s Elbow, spreading through a ghastly, mushroom-shaped cloud.

Without warning, the water of Riddleport Bay retreated into a low tide, revealing sunken wrecks, flopping fish, and more than a few stranded sharks. In seconds, the water all came rushing back, a seven-foot-high wall of churning froth that slammed into the waterfront. 

Everyone within seventy feet of the shore was knocked down by the wave like bowling pins. The victims were washed over inland, then dragged out into the harbor with the receding wave. The scream of the waters shook the walls of the gambling hall.

Tsuto and Kuva shared a dark, wide-eyed stare. Saul was right. It wasn’t over. Not even close.


	26. Burnt Offerings

Shinya blinked in the midmorning sunlight. They hadn’t left the catacombs, the glassworks in what seemed an eternity but in truth had been mere hours, though spent in rebirth and study of their new, arcane world. As such, they were starving.

They went straight to the plaza with a wicker basket on their arm. Thankfully, enough time had passed since the goblin raid on Sandpoint that the open-air market had returned to its usual operation. Shinya went from stall to colorful stall, packing their basket full of autumnal offerings of bread, meat, cheese, dried fruits, and fresher offerings brought by the trade caravans from the south.

By noon, the basket was as heavy as a fatted sow on their arm. Shinya was more than ready to return to Eryu and her sanctum of learning when a familiar outline flanked by that of an elf and an athletic woman’s at the market’s edge caught their eye.

The basket fell from their arms. “A-Ameko?”

Shinya ran through the crowd, leaping and squeezing their way through. To her credit, their elder sister did the same, tears of joy running from her eyes. The two swept each other into a spinning embrace.

“Shinya! Shinya! Thank Shelyn you’re alright. You’re not-you’re not gonna believe this…”

Their joyous laughter quieted to a wizened chuckle. “I think I could say the same, but you can go first.”

“Yes! Yes! But we can’t talk here. Come on, come back to the Rusty Dragon with me..and Shalo and Kela.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Shinya broke away with a grin. They jogged back to where they’d dropped their basket.

Much to their surprise, they found another familiar figure crouched low to the plaza, returning the last of the spilled items to the basket. The young man looked up, sleek curtains of chestnut brown hair parting over his narrow, olive-skinned face. Alder Fox, heir to one of the four noble houses of Sandpoint, flashed Shinya a dazzling smile.

“Shinya Kaijitsu. Yours, I presume?” he offered them the heavy-laden basket.

The changeling took it in both arms. “Th-thanks, Alder.”

“You making lunch?”

“That was the plan, but it looks like I’m headed to the Rusty Dragon.”

“It’s open again? I think I might head over there myself. Shall we head over together?”

“I-yes. Let’s.”

So they walked, side-by-side, out from the bustling plaza.


	27. Reign of Winter

“I hate this filthy cumslut. I want them dead.” Lady Jai kicked Shizu’s unconscious body, stirring a flutter into their eyelids and a gasp of pain from their lips.

“Now, now, my wife. I’ve officially accepted them as my apprentice. I can’t just kill them. The board of witches would surely investigate me for malpractice.”

“Well I saw them trying to tempt you with that lewd body of theirs. They can’t go unpunished. Give them to me, just for today. The apprenticing can start tomorrow.”

“Very well, but I expect Shizu back in one piece having had a full eight hours worth of sleep.” Or there would be no spellcasting from them. That was just how magic worked for those whose power required study.

Lady Jai smiled prettily. “As you wish, my husband.”

She leaned in to plant a deep, sucking kiss into Lord Rasek’s mouth. Then grabbed his new apprentice by the hair and dragged them down the ice-carved hall.

The lady of Waldsby and the Pale Tower kicked Shizu, waking, into a cavernous storage chamber walled with the same ice as the rest of the tower. Crates, urns, decanters, and storage boxes piled high along the walls. A mirrored vanity and chair sat next to a window four stories over the snow-capped woods below. At the center of the room was an imperious ice statue of White Witch Nazha, daughter of Irrisen’s only true Witch Queen, the Jadwiga Elvanna.

The storeroom served as a holding room for the sylph’s sole other prisoner, the ram-horned fey Matveius. He or they were built like an elf, tall and lean, but with the more severe, hungry look of the fey. His skin was the color of pine bark, his slit-like eyes the color of pine needles, and his hair a mirror of the long, blue-glass spikes of the icicles that hung ever-present from their boughs.

He could do no more than glare, held in Lord Rasek’s enchanted stocks of ice. The witchwork glyphs carved into the pillory stripped the fey of all the powers granted them by Baba Yaga, former queen of Irrisen. He grimaced in seething hatred as Lady Jai stuck a long, blue finger up his tight asshole and licked her lips.

“Soon, my pet.” She snapped her fingers.

Bluish-white ropes, also enchanted by the lord of the tower, coiled around the weak, pathetically struggling Shizu. They lashed the apprentice’s arms behind their back, binding them tight at the elbows and wrists. More ropes pinned their arms to their body, binding them over and under the full, fleshy globes of their tits.

The magic restraints pulled tight around the changeling’s throat, near to choking. The dangling leashed yanked. Shizu, sputtering, was forced to their knees, bent until their cheeks and perfect tits were pressed flat to the frozen floor in front of the fey.

The slyph floated to the other side of the stocks. She rammed the six-inch heel of her boot up the apprentice’s fear-clenched anus. Shizu shrieked, jerking and straining against their bonds. The ropes only shoved the penetrated changeling harder into the floor.

Lady Jai smiled coldly. “That’s better, you shameless bitch. Now let’s put that filthy of yours mouth to use.”

She made a much more complicated gesture, the bluish-white rings on her fingers glinting in the light. The ropes yanked her husband’s revoltingly slutty apprentice up on their knees and across the ice beneath the stocks. Shizu’s leash wrapped around Matveius’ taut asscheeks and pulled tight, forcing their head down onto the fey’s large, gagging cock.

The Tian-Min choked, snot and tears leaking from their face. Pleased, the sylph shrugged off her diaphanous robes and procured a strap-on harness and a large, double-sided dildo. She wedged one end through the harness crotch and between her puffy, pussy lips and pegged the other up the pillory-restrained fey’s asshole.

Matveius hissed and snorted as his jailer bucked and rocked herself to moaning ecstasy in his anus. Such was the length and thickness of Lady Jai’s dildo vibrating between his stretched anal walls that its her heavy head was soon slamming into the fey’s g-spot. He grunted through his clenched teeth, but all the willpower in the world couldn’t stop his treacherous anus from squeezing tight around her raping girth.

With a snarled groan, cum burst from Matveius’ cock into the mouth of the apprentice forced to sheath it. The witch choked on and under his dick, their gasping throat sucking down every drop of the fey’s seed in place of air.

The sylph laughed mercilessly. She continued to sodomize her captive fey until she’d lost count of her dizzying, mind-blanking orgasms. But even her sated cunt couldn’t appease her desire to dominate and humiliate.

Lady Jai called for the tower guards. Using their strength in numbers, she transferred her fey fucktoy into a collar and sigil-graven cuffs of cold iron. His wrists were secured behind his back and his ankles on opposite ends of a cold iron spreader bar, forcing him to sit cross-legged on the floor. She clapped their large, delectable cock into a cold iron sleeve that forced them erect for as long as she pleased.

At her direction, the guards kept Shizu’s upper body in their current bondage and sat the witch on Matveius’ dick in their pussy and the end of the vibrating double dildo still wet with the sylph’s slick in their anus. They added ropes to bind Shizu’s crossed ankles behind the fey’s back and pulled their rope leash through the ring on his collar, forcing their upright bodies pressed chest to chest.

Lady Jai and the guards finally left them, the changeling squirming in the fey’s lap, their pussy and anal shafts squeezing tighter and tighter around the cock and dildo impaling them to the hilt. Shizu whimpered as soon as they left, their head lolling onto the fey’s strong, brown shoulder.

“S-sor-s-s-sorry,” they drooled helplessly onto his slightly shuddering collarbone, their weak flesh quivering against the solid wall of his chest as their stuffed shafts wracked their bound body with convulsions.

“Forget it,” he grunted, doing his best to avoid inhaling the Tian-Min’s sexed scent too deeply. His cock was already agonized enough as it was in the sylph’s orgasm-denying sleeve. “Just let go. Let go, and it’ll get easier.”

They could feel the heat of the changeling’s humiliated flush through the joined press of their sweating flesh. The apprentice let out a helpless sob, squeezing their eyes shut. But Shizu was desperate enough to try anything to mute the pleasure being violently forced up their pussy and anus.

Shizu let go. Their sob melded into a screech of senseless, animal rut. Their unleashed body bucked and rocked so wildly in the fey’s lap that the two forcibly entwined prisoners toppled to their sides on the storeroom floor where they moaned and panted no better than the filthy animals they’d been accused of being all along.

After several such toe-curling, hip-bucking, back-arching orgasms, Shizu’s consciousness slowly rolled back into their mind. Their grasp of the world returned, and they found themself now lying atop the fey stuffing their erratically spasming shafts. They opened their mouth in ragged apology.

Their fellow prisoner shook his sweat-plastered head. “Do-over. Do-over. I’m M-Mat-Matveius.”

“Sh-Shizu.”

“Wh-what brings you here?” the fey rasped, half-jokingly.

“B-Baba Yaga.”

“Wh-what?”

“B-Baba Y-Yaga,” the foreigner squeaked, twitching out another climax onto his constricted cock.

“I’ve g-got some bad news for you.”

Every hundred years, Baba Yaga returned to Irrisen from the vast circuit of her many realms to place a new steward queen upon the throne. This was such a year, but the Queen of the Witches had failed to make her triumphal entry. Moreover, Witch Queen Jadwiga Elvanna had rounded up all those loyal to her mother and offered them a choice: swear fealty to her or die.

“F-FUCK!!!”


	28. The Toll of It All

“I’m sorry Ameko, but I can’t go with you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Did you hear a single word that came out of my mouth just now? Did you even look at this fucking royal-ass warding box?”

Shalo, Kela, and Alder had given the two reunited siblings a private corner booth. The three couldn’t help the occasional glance from over their tankards of winterdrop mead.

“I looked, I heard, and, I’m sorry, but I’m not kidding. Dad needs me here,” Shinya lied, “especially now that Shizu won’t be around to help man the glassworks.”

Her relationship with their father was strained enough that she didn’t need to hear how their half-brother had up and murdered him, and definitely not in her agitated state. Shinya WAS slightly saddened that their twin hadn’t said goodbye before going off to chase after their mysterious mother...moreso that they hadn’t offered them the chance to go along. 

Then again, goodbyes had never been Shizu’s style. And there was no way they could lose the knowledge and power offered by their new, tiny demon mentor. Though according to Eryu’s preliminary lesson, they were merely unlocking and guiding the powers now springing from Shinya themself.

“Fine. Fine!” yelled Ameko, slamming her tankard to the table and throwing her hands in the air. “I’ll just cross the world to Minkai and save our homeland all by my fucking self.”

“If anyone can do it, Ameko, it’s you.”

She let out a long sigh, letting her hands fall to the leather seats. “Have fun in dinky little Sandpoint. I’m getting on the first caravan out of here. I’ll send you a postcard from Kasai.”

“Good luck, big sis. I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, alright. Come ‘ere you little scamp.”

The Kaijitsu siblings got up from the booth to pull each other into a tight, fast-blinking embrace.

“Goodbye, Ameko.”

“Bye, Shinya. I love you too, kid.”

Sensing the end was nigh, Shalo, Kela, and Alder rose from their seats. Indeed, when the two broke apart, Ameko nodded at the elf and Ulfen woman.

“Shalo, Kela, let’s roll.”

The elf shook their head. “I’m a goblin-slayer, Ameko Kaijitsu. We part ways here as well.”

“Oh. Oh, okay.”

“Goodbye, Ameko.”

“Goodbye, Shalo. Thanks, thanks for everything.” She found herself blinking hard once more. The elf walked soundlessly out the Rusty Dragon. Ameko plastered on a smile. “Looks like it’s just you and me, Kela.”

“I like the sound of that,” the barbarian grinned. “After you, Your Highness.”

The Ulfen held the door open with a mock bow. The eldest Kaijitsu shot a wink at her younger sibling and walked out before the insufferably attractive warrior. Which left Shinya alone with the equally attractive nobleman. 

The younger Kaijitsu cleared their throat with a cough. Thankfully, Alder spared them the awkwardness by speaking first and with confidence to spare.

“You know, Shinya, I’m very glad to have run into you. I’ve been meaning to get to know you better, especially since we’re both, well, something of heirs to the town. How would you like to go boar hunting with me?”

“Boar hunting!” There was something that Shinya had never once attempted. They were, however, quite a different person since the last time the two had crossed paths, an occasion so far in the distant past that they couldn’t recall it themself. “Sure, why not?”

Alder clapped a warm, solid hand on their shoulder, sending a pleasantly cool shiver down Shinya’s back.

“Excellent. See you tomorrow, dawn. Don’t be late.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

#*#*#*#*

Tsuto walked out behind the Shin Rakorath with Saul and his final bodyguard in their custody. In broad daylight it was easy to see that the mysterious Blot was finally gone, no doubt the falling star that struck Devil’s Elbow. But the tsunami in its wake had devastated the Wharf District.

Dozens of ships were beached with several washed inland and left stranded as far as Wharf Street, and that was nothing on the number of reefclaws, sharks, and other dangerous sea creatures just as stranded. Many of Riddleport’s piers were ruined, and several of the smaller buildings along the waterfront has sustained irrecoverable damage. Further into the city, pouts of smoke billowed up from the skyline. The pillaging had begun.

Tsuto let out a low whistle. Then he glanced back and caught sight of the state of the Gold Gambling that had now fallen into his possession. 

“Ah, fuck.” It had to be another thousand in water damages at the very least. That said, the building was still standing. “What the Hells, if there was ever a night for drinking and tossing coin it’s tonight. The Gold Goblin is back open for business, baby!”

#*#*#*#*

It was a letter from Lord Rasek’s cousin, the White Witch Nazha, that ultimately came out of left field and ruined Lady Jai’s fun. The Lady of Whitethrone City had decided it was time for one of her many, many lavish, extended balls. Rasek himself entered his wife’s storeroom/torture chamber to retrieve his apprentice and Jai’s fucktoy.

“Aren’t you two getting cozy,” he murmured less insouciantly than he cared to admit. 

With a sharp snap of his fingers, the ropes fell from his apprentice/slave’s naked body. He gathered gathered them into his arms in a white fur blanket. He wrapped it snug around their generous curves and carried his property to the waiting sleigh, leaving the guards to drag Matveius on a chain leash after him.

His wife’s crystalline, radiant smile slipped from her face and crashed to the floor at the sight of Shizu nestled in his arms. But what was a new witchmaster to do? He laid them in the back of the sleigh between the seat and the hole-poked, cold iron trunk into which the guards threw the fey.

With a flick of the reins, they were off, his sexy sylph of a wife nuzzling his neck while the driver guided their team of reindeer through the woods to Whitethrone. Rasek slipped his hand beneath their own white fur blanket to finger her tight, wet cunt. Her pussy lips sucked in his fingers as ravenously as a cock.

She was soon gasping and moaning, both hands clutching his arm to brace herself as she bucked and ground her mound into his palm. “Oh Rasek, Rasek, yes! Yes!”

He reached over with his other hand and caught her by the throat, stifling her cries for the sake of the sleigh driver. There was really no way of muffling all that humping, gyrating, whining and whimpering, though. Rasek simply smiled and shook his head fondly. Not everyone was lucky enough to have such a loyal, lascivious lady.

Then the howls of a wolfpack split the growing darkness of the northern autumn afternoon. The driver pulled the reindeer to a stop before that got antsy over Nazha’s incoming woodland rangers. Jai, having cum several times on her husband’s fingers already quickly straightened her robes and furs.

Five winter wolves stepped out from between the trees in human form but the animal’s triangular formation. A grin of elongated, razor-sharp teeth spread across their leader’s gray-bearded face. All their hair came in shades of white and gray regardless of their canine-true ages.

“Lord Rasek, Lady Jai, always a pleasure to smell the country cousins of the White Witch.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you have a particularly woodsy musk of your own. What can I do for you today?”

“Toll,” said the leader.

“Toll,” “toll,” “toll,” echoed their packwolves.

“I smell a fey and a changeling, too.”

“We’d be happy to pay a toll to such hardworking rangers as yourselves,” Jai piped up cheerily. Because of course she would.

Rasek sighed and let the rangers lead the sleigh just off the mainway to a rough wooden cabin. The leader held the door open and waiting while their fellows scampered eagerly into the darkness within.

The sleigh driver unlocked the fey’s feet from the spreader bar and locked them back on the proper sides to force their legs apart rather than cross-legged. They marched the hobbled Matveius into the cabin then returned for the semi-conscious changeling. They threw Shizu, blanket and all, over their shoulder and simply handed Rasek’s apprentice off to the leader.

With a decidedly inhuman howl, the leader grabbed the edge of the fur blanket and whipped it open, throwing Shizu naked and shivering to the floor. The rangers descended with belted sleeves made of furry hide. They forced the apprentice’s weakly fighting, flailing limbs each into a separate sleeve then belted each leg thigh-to-calf and each arm forearm-to-bicep.

Rasek and Jai watched from the doorway as the rangers slapped Shizu’s ass, forcing them to yelp and teter around on their elbows and knees like a very wobbly beast. Matveius watched from the floor, naked, helpless, and glowering death at them all.

In their growing excitement, the rangers stripped off their weapons and armor. Their skin had already begun sprouting fine coats of white and gray fur. With their bodies free and stiffened dicks highly apparent, the winter wolves let loose and shifted into their true, bestial forms in a howling ripple of lean muscle and thick fur.

The bear-sized wolves were eight feet long, standing four and a half feet at the shoulder. Each weighed well over four hundred pounds, and their bluish-white eyes glittered with an ice-cold intelligence.

The first two flipped Matveius onto his stomach and knees with their paws and frost-rimed muzzles. One mounted him from behind, drawing a roar of pain from the fey as they shoved their cock and massive knot up his swollen anus. The other cut off his pained cries, thrusting his dick knot-deep into Matveius’ mouth, his head slamming the back of their throat.

Shizu was grabbed from behind and flipped over with their back against a winter wolf’s heated belly. They weren’t left shivering for long. The wolf under them forced her cock and knot up the screaming apprentice’s asshole. Another wolf mounted them from above, shoving his dick and knot into their pussy and ripping their walls apart even as he rubbed himself against the bestial cock tearing through their anal shaft.

So deeply, brutally stuffed was the changeling that their eyes rolled to the back of their head, their cries falling to incoherent, saliva-dripping garbles. The leader shut the bitch-sleeved Shizu up further, ramming their cock and knot into their mewling mouth.

All Rasek could see of his property was the pathetic jerking and flapping of their belt-bound limbs between the crush of knotted, raping wolves under, over, and inside his apprentice. Unfortunately, he had an excellent view of the woodland rangers, pistoning their cocks into Shizu’s deepest, fleshy cavities. He’d been there himself, as his familiar Valst.

Just watching the wolves penetrate, violate his apprentice he could feel the changeling’s hot, wet grip around his goat’s dick and knot. Locked inside them, thrusting into their guts while Shizu’s lewd walls clenched tighter and tighter around his raping dick, submitting like a proper bitch to his domination and pleasure.

Rasek swallowed, his tightened throat shortening his breath at the visceral memory. The wolves ended his reverie with their yowling. The first had worked her dick to bursting in Shizu’s anus and the second in Matveius’. 

The knotted, mounted beasts exploded their seed into either of their convulsing bitch’s spasming shafts. They pumped them full and remained locked inside them, taking up their wall-ripping assault again to prepare for the next load. 

All around, their raping brethren in their captive’s twitching mouths and pussy picked up the pace with their own yowling. Cum burst into the helplessly bound and mounted bitches’ knotted holes.

Jai sighed with a happy smile at the thronging of those locked bodies, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder. Over her head where she could not see, the ghost of a grimace settled on Rasek’s lips as he brushed away the unconscious urge to murder every last one of his cousin’s toll-raping rangers again and again and again.


	29. Cohorts and Competition

The falling star’s false dawn may’ve been spine-chilling, but the Goblin’s reopening under Tsuto’s brand new management was truly golden. The gambling hall was alive with light, sound, and the honeysweet flow of chips and booze. The tuxedo-vested half-elf leaned against the bar counter tipping back an extra dirty martini in self congratulations. Nothing could ruin this mo… 

That wasn’t a customer who walked through the doors. It was Kuva, frowning as always, it seemed.

Tsuto tipped back his entire martini and attempted to casually hop the bar and duck down on the other side. Sadly, none of his employees stopped the Mwangi elf from walking around to the other side. He'd have to bring up stricter customer service policies at the next meeting.

"Honeycock," said the elf.

"Oh, Kuva, didn't see you there, friend. Just inspecting the floorboards for tsunami damage, as proprietors do. How can I help you?"

"Can we speak somewhere more private?"

"No," Tsuto lied.

Undeterred, Kuva crouched down behind the bar themself, forcing the attending Mardu to pick her way around the both of them.

"The Shin Rakorath have reason to believe our suspect and her allies have fled to Devil's Elbow," they spoke in hushed Elven.

"Good for them."

"It seems I was not transparent. They are not simply taking refuge. They are likely continuing the experimentation that brought down the star and destroyed Riddleport's port."

"Ah." It was much harder to glib away that one. But damned if Tsuto didn't try. "And what does that have to do with a lowly, civilian gambling house operator?"

"Your combat skills are par none, even among our agents. You also saw our suspect and could help identify her. Please, come with me to the island. We'll catch her and finish this."

The half-elf massaged his eyelids. There was really no rest for a good man. "Fine. We go, we catch her, and then we're done."

"Thank y…"

"Mardu," he interrupted, rising to his feet between her and the drink she was attempting to pour, which drew a look from the waiting customer. "Congratulations, you've been promoted to floor manager."

"I-wha…?"

"Hold my calls for a few days. I have some city-saving business to attend to."

Kuva stood up beside him, which drew not a look but a weary headshake from the cocktail-less customer. He gave a stiff, business nod to Tsuto and Mardu. "We leave at dawn. The Shin Rakorath have chartered a ship from out of town, the Flying Cloud."

"Sure, if there's a pier up by then," Tsuto snorted.

"Three have been up for hours. Your city's crimelords saw to that."

Of course they did. They just had to keep their illegal operations operating. "Great. See you at dawn, friend."

"Yeah, on your own time," the patron interjected. "Saul's gone one day and the customer service goes to wet shit."

The half-elf let out a deep sigh. Perhaps an island vacation was exactly what he needed.

#*#*#*#*

Whitethrone was seated on the northern shore of Glace Lake. It was home to a diverse population of Jadwiga, Ulfen, dwarves, fey, gnomes, ice trolls, snow goblins, and winter wolves, though the majority of Ulfen, dwarves, and gnomes were little more than the slave-force that kept the city running like clockwork.

Lord Rasek and company reached Whitethrone in the evening, where they and the rest of the Jadwiga noble traffic were immediately directed to the guest district by the White Witch Nazha's friendly mirror men enforcers. The robed, hooded constructs might be mistaken for winter-touched fey at a distance until one got a good, reflective look at the face under the cowl.

Presently, the featureless oval mirrors under the hoods were playing Lady Nazha's pre-recorded message on repeat. Rasek's pale, white-blonde cousin chirped cheerfully from the silver surface.

"Welcome one, welcome all to Whitethrone's Guest District! Tonight we feast in celebration of this year's early commencement of the Apprentice Games!" She paused here, smiling, to presumed fanfare.

Rasek, however, could only curse. The quadrennial Apprentice Games were one of the reasons he'd long avoided taking an apprentice of his own. They were a stupid, proxy pissing contest for the Jadwiga witches where the points didn't matter and the fun tended to prove fatal for the hapless apprentice contestants. The reward was similarly stupid and worthless, a semester of study for the apprentice at the side of Witch Queeen Elvanna.

"Oh Rasek dear, won't this be fun?" Jai said delightedly, pressing herself to his arm.

Thankfully, Nazha's continuing message freed him of the need to reply.

"To spare all our witchmasters any subconscious whim of cheating, kindly hand off your apprentice to the nearest mirror man for the night. Never fear, you'll see them again first thing tomorrow morning at the dawn commencement of the games...at which time any and all communication between you is considered cheating until the conclusion of the first round."

"Goodness, we can't be thought to be cheating," said the sylph. "Let's hand your apprentice over to this mirror man at once. We're already stopped from this backed up traffic anyway."

This time, Jai didn't wait for a reply. She waved at the message-spewing mirror man in front of them and pointed to the back of the sleigh. "They're in here, officer."

The construct marched through the tall bank of crunching snow and lifted Shizu, still swaddled in the fur blanket, up in both arms. Irrisen's dark, bone-cutting chill had them shivering awake seconds out of the enchanted sleigh.

"Shizu, just relax," Rasek shouted over the whipping wind. "I know this is sudden, but…"

Jai yanked him back down onto the seat beside her. "Don't worry, my husband. Your cousin must've prepared a message just for the apprentices. Look, traffic's moving! We'll be at the feast in no time."

The sylph was correct on both counts. Shizu was relayed a quick and deceptively upbeat explanation of the games in which they would be forced to participate while they were taken for a freezing walk through the charmingly winding and irregular streets of the Guest District.

Everywhere the eye could see were cozy, empty houses covered in intricate woodwork and painted in light pastels. The rooftops were steeply pitched to allow the heavy, perpetual winter snows to slide off. Covered alleyways ran between some closely adjacent buildings, sheltering the tourist walkways from the elements. Elsewhere, open-air bridges or crosswalks joined buildings together at their upper levels. Snowdrifts laid heaped between houses, but the streets were shoveled and brushed clean by the inconspicuous slave-force.

The mirror man finally set Shizu down inside the white picket fence around a seventy-foot clocktower of solid stone. The construct handed them a room key as another pre-recorded message informed them that all apprentices were being housed here for the night.

Shizu drew their blanket around them and dashed into the tower away from the elements. Its wooden interior was warm, so mercifully warm that the ill-fortuned witch nearly sobbed. Instead, they made their way up to the room on the third floor.

They opened the door, their eyes meeting a strikingly green pair. Another young apprentice was inside, this one wearing a blue and white uniform with a furred and hooded robe. Long, fox-red tresses draped over her shoulders.

"Oh, hello. You must be my roommate. I'm Ylja. There are...uniforms and robes in the dresser if you're in need."

"Thanks," said the changeling, striding to the dresser at once. "I'm Shizu."

"Nice to meet you, if not well met," Ylja jested gently. "No need to be shy on my account, but I can step outside if you need a moment."

"No, no, it's fine." They stepped behind the door of the dresser and changed into their first real clothes after what had seemed an entire lifetime of humiliation.

Ylja took a seat on one of the two opposite beds, leaning back on her hands. "They're going to bring dinner up in an hour or so, but I have a bit of chocolate…"

Shizu began salivating at the first mention of the delectable, comforting treat. "I could literally kill for some."

With a tinkling laugh, Ylja broke off a square of dark chocolate and held it out to Shizu. The changeling was far too weary to do anything but snatch and eat it up as fast as possible. The bittersweet, drugged confectionery went straight to their head.

The huldra apprentice, a fey with a fox's tail and an opening in her back that revealed her body to be a living wooden shell, rolled her eyes as her competitor dropped to the floor. Pathetic. From the looks of it, their abusive master had already sabotaged them. Unlike Shizu, however, Ylja was not about to be too careful.

She hauled the changeling onto the opposite bed. Using her dagger, she cut long strips from the mattress to bind their wrists and ankles spread-eagle to the wooden bedposts. Shizu would show up late to the games if they showed up at all, which would hopefully disqualify them.

Ylja passed an idle glance down their drugged, helplessly bound form. A heated flush of power spread from her gut into her chest and down between her legs. Was this how the witchmasters felt all the time? It was... intoxicating.

The huldra bit her lip, eyes flicking toward the door. She went to lock it, then climbed onto the bed with her captive. Her body aflame with this new sensation, she unbuttoned Shizu's shirt, baring their rounded tits.

Ylja groped the soft flesh in one hand. The other dipped below the hem of her skirt, rubbing her suddenly needy clit. Her body was hot as a pure, and it was not enough.

She straddled Shizu's hips, bending forward to suck at their nipples. She stuffed two fingers into her pussy, her walls wet with slick. Ylja whined like a begging bitch, finger-fucking her own cunt as she rocked her clit onto Shizu's mound.

Her strong, fox-furred tail snaked up the changeling's skirt, teased aside their new underwear, and plowed itself up their asshole. Though drugged into deep slumber, Shizu's body was still slave to instinct. As Ylja's thrusting tail ripped their anal walls apart, their breath shortened to ragged panting and their hips bucked under the huldra.

Ylja squealed over her squirming captive. The heat of power turned to lancing pleasure in her clit, spearing her through to the spine. Her back arched, a scream of ecstasy escaping her lips as clutched Shizu's hips between her thighs and rode them for dear life like a bucking bronco.

The fey came and came again. She pulled her tail out of the changeling and rammed it up her own, tight asshole to cum some more. So that she, too, was salivating by the time that a construct arrived with dinner.


	30. Discoveries

Alder arrived at dawn at the Kaijitsu Manor with a horse for himself and one for Shinya. The changeling blinked the weariness from their eyes. They hadn’t slept well away from their new, monk-like cell in the catacombs, but one look at the noble’s rakishly handsome face was banishing all their aches and pains.

They saddled up for the two hour ride to the wilds around the Turandok River, which acted as a natural border between woodland and marsh. Alder proved as charming in conversation as he was in feature, though Shinya’s judgment was becoming less objective by the minute. By the time they reached the Tickwood, they wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d read or at least heard of every book in the Avistan literary canon, and somehow the noble still found time to rub shoulders with Magnimar’s high-rollers.

“But enough about the big city, here we are in boar country,” he laughed. He pulled a hunting horn from his saddlebag. “You have one as well. If you catch sight of a boar, just blow and the hunt is on.”

“Take away,” Shinya giggled. They sobered instantly as Alder pulled his horse back toward another direction. “Wait, we’re not hunting boar together?”

“Oh no, dear Shinya.” A mischievous grin spread across his face. “This is a competition. You can be sure I’ll find and take your kill if you don’t get it first.”

“Oh, okay.” 

They watched more crestfallen than they cared to admit as the noble winked and rode off into the trees. In his absence, all their weariness returned. Shinya sighed and guided their horse forward into a step more plodding than galloping along the riverbank.

They barely noticed when their horse crossed one of the many bridges to the marshy side, but they couldn’t miss plodding into a lingering cloud stink of rotting flesh. Shinya snapped to attention with a groan of disgust, looking this way and that.

They were on relatively dry land but wet enough that the ground held barefoot humanoid tracks through the mud, headed toward and away from the Sandpoint Lumber Mill upriver. The mill was eerily silent. Shinya’s eyes narrowed.

More goblins? They dismounted, tying their horse to a bridgepost. They followed the footprints to the mill quietly, cautiously, with a hand over their hilt.

The thick-walled structure was built primarily of timbers. Even the roof was made from wooden shingles. It was the metal machinery that had been disengaged for the night and for some reason left so this morning.

The muddy prints disappeared into the river, then reappeared on the mill’s timber delivery pier. They crossed over to the main structure...and scaled the wall to a now broken, upper-floor window.

“Oh, shit.”

Then Shinya entered the mill. “Oh, SH…!”

They retched at the sight and powerful reek of decay. The interior was coated with blood-stained sawdust and strewn with a wild chase of footprints. One body had obviously met its end in the log-splitter, the remains lying in mangled heaps over the cut wood.

The other body had been affixed naked to the wall by the hooks used to hang machinery. The face and lower jaw had been ripped away entirely. Carved deeply across its chest was a now familiar rune in the shape of a seven-pointed star.

Shinya ran out from the mill, stumbling and vomiting until they’d escaped the noxious cloud of rotted flesh. Nula...Nula was back. She had to be, and with some new horrible plan for Sandpoint.

They reached their horse, fingers fumbling at the saddlebags. The changeling blew into the hunting horn, blasting a ringing, clarion call. Alder had to have heard it.

But they couldn’t let the nobleman see them like this. They were a shaky wreck on the verge of both laughing and crying as well as a literal mess. So they climbed back onto their poor horse and broke into a gallop for town. Hopefully, the sight at the mill would be so awful that Alder would forget they’d ever existed.

Or maybe the smell would do it. The smell had been worse, the ripened remains of the dead injected straight up the nostrils. Shinya was, however, far too shaken to question how two recently murdered victims could emit such a pronounced and aged reek of decay.

#*#*#*#*

Silver bells rang in the dawn from the top of the clocktower. Shizu woke starving, dishevelled, and unable to rise from bed. They jerked their arms and legs. Cloth bonds cut into the flesh of their wrists and ankles.

A shadow fell over them. Their eyes met those of cruel and sparkling green.

“Good morning, Shizu,” said Ylja, her voice low and husky. “Be a good little bitch and stay here, won’t you? I promise I’ll let you out to play after I win the round.”

She pinched the changeling’s nipple. Shizu snarled like a wild animal, straining at their bonds. The huldra jumped back in shock. She hurriedly backed out of the room.

Shizu roared and tried to rip free once more, but the fabric held. They were simply too weak after the long days and nights of brutal punishment. They flumped back against the bed with a soft sob of laughter.

The Apprentice Games and everyone involved could go fuck themselves. All they wanted was something to eat. And water.

There was a clack against the window. Shizu turned their head. Their eyes prickled hot with tears. It was a raven, picking the lock.

The window opened with an icy gust. Shizu shivered and laughed, tears rolling down their cheeks.

“Shizu! Lords below, it’s been a fucking time. Just hang on.” Xuzu tore up the cloth tying one wrist.

Shizu sat up and freed the other while their familiar freed their ankles. The changeling staggered off the bed and slammed the window shut. They slumped against the wall, laughing and sliding down to a heap on the floor.

“Xuzu, Xuzu,” they rasped.

“Don’t try to talk. Looks like somebody left ya dinner over here.”

“Poisoned.”

The raven took a peck at it. “Seems alright. Drink some water, will ya?”

They needed no further encouragement. Shizu crawled over as fast as they could and devoured last night’s dinner like the starved animal they were. Their physical and mental faculties trickled back with their belly full and watered.

Xuzu flew to a perch on their shoulder. They nuzzled their darker than black beak against the side of Shizu’s head. Shizu let out a deep, shaky sigh.

“What’ve you got for me?”

The raven cackled. “That’s my witch.”

#*#*#*#*

Just as Kuva said, there were three recently but well-constructed piers up with the Flying Cloud moored at one of them. The four-masted vessel was built for speed with a narrow beam, sharply raked stem, and square rig.

The elf, already boarded, awaited Tsuto at the railing beside a devastatingly attractive aquatic elf in a loose white blouse and skin-tight leather trousers. The ship’s captain had their long, blue-green locks loosely tied back with a black ribbon. Their skin was sea-green and their eyes as dark as the oceanic depths.

The half-elf consciously picked up his pace to squeeze between the dreadfully stiff Kuva and this dashing character. “Good morning, there. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Tsuto Kaijitsu…”

“Honeycock, I’ve heard,” the aquatic elf teasingly smirked. “Captain Josey, at your service.”

They swept into a dramatically deep bow. Over which Tsuto gave the Mwangi elf a pointedly disapproving frown.

“It seems my name precedes me. Delightful.”

“Delightful, indeed,” said Josey, straightening. “Might I offer you two some breakfast as we disembark?”

“Only at the cost of the pleasure of your company,” said the half-elf, smiling once more.

“I wouldn’t dream of it any other way. Go ahead belowdecks to my cabin. I’ll join you shortly.”

“Thanks,” said Kuva.

The two found the cozy cabin without trouble. A member of the crew, another aquatic elf, brought wooden platters of fresh, seared reefclaw, steaming vegetable stew, a basket of warm bread, and a pitcher of mulled wine. The aroma alone was enough to tempt the two into picking at the autumnal offerings while they awaited Josey.

“Strong stuff,” said Tsuto, swirling the wine in his wooden goblet. It was, in fact, so potent that a few sips had left him slurring.

The goblet dropped from Kuva’s fingers, wine spilling across the floor. “It’s drugged.”

They sprang to their feet, chair toppling to the floor behind them. Tsuto flopped backward into his, head spinning. As his head lolled upward, he opened his mouth to warn Kuva, but his tongue was too thick and clumsy.

Thunk! A thick wooden sap clocked the elf from the shadows. Captain Josey and six of their crewmates stepped into view. The captain shook their head, clucking their tongue.

“I could never treat a guest like this, but your pal Zincher gave me an offer I simply couldn’t refuse.”

“Never heard of ‘em,” the half-elf slurred, feeling saliva dribbling from the corners of his mouth but unable to do anything to stop it.

“Lucky you, he won’t leave you in the dark for long. I’m to deliver you to his camp on Devil’s Elbow. Imagine that.” The captain jerked a nod at their crew. “Take the landlubbers up to the rail. They’re not messing my cabin.”

“Too late,” said Tsuto with a loopy, shit-eating grin. Before anyone could grab him, he took a leak right there in the captain’s cabin.

“Besmara’s tits! Get these fools up there, now!”

The elf and half-elf were man-handled up to the ship’s rail. The crew bound their forearms behind their backs and lashed their legs to bars of the rail, forcing them apart.

The captain walked up behind Tsuto. They unbuckled his belt and folded it in their hands. Without a word of warning, they whipped the leather across his back.

The half-elf, who should’ve been knocked out by the massive dose of taggit oil in the wine, grunted in pain. Josey frowned and yanked his pants down from the taut flesh of his asscheeks. They whipped his ass red and bloody.

But Tsuto refused to offer any response other than his half-disinterested grunts. Josey hurled his belt into the sea in frustration.

“Alright, you want this the hard way? Who am I to put out a guest?”

The aquatic elf shoved their sea-green cock up the half-elf’s tightly clenched ass. Gripping their restrained cargo’s hips, they pistoned up his anal shaft, splitting his walls apart.

That bastard moaned. “Harder, daddy!”

“Fuck you!” Josey screamed, slamming their cock into Tsuto’s g-spot.

His shaft spasmed and wrapped tight around their jackhammering dick. The harder and faster they fucked the bastard, the tighter his anus sucked in and squeezed down on their cock.

Soon it was Josey who was moaning, wedged by the dick into the mercilessly tight, hot suck of Tsuto’s ass. They cried out to the sea, pounding their cargo into the rail. Cum exploded from their cock into the sweet, dangerous squeeze of the half-elf’s anus.

“Fuck you, fuck you, you fucking bastard,” Josey panted. They collapsed, spent, onto Tsuto’s back.

Low vibrations rattled up from the half-elf’s back into the captain’s chest. He was laughing, fucking laughing.

The aquatic elf eased their cock out. They righted their pants before barking out a new order to their crew. “It’s smooth sailing from here, mates. Come show our guests a good time.”


	31. Rise of the Magi

The first thing Shinya did once they’d reached town was relay the news of the murders to Sheriff Hemlock. The still-beleaguered sheriff immediately jumped into action. They gathered a small team and rode out from the local police station.

The changeling didn’t stick around to watch. They couldn’t risk Alder making his way to the police station as well. They hurried back to the glassworks, literally running through the catacombs to Eryu.

“Eryu! Eryu!”

The quasit flew out from the meditation chamber and caught her student by the shoulders. “Shinya, calm down. You’re hyperventilating.”

The two breathed together until Shinya could match the demon. Then they let out everything, the tracks, the bodies, the smell, and that fucking star. Eryu nodded sagely.

“I know just what you need. Follow me.”

She flew to the red cathedral chamber, all the way to the bubbling runewell. The quasit winked at Shinya over her shoulder. Then bit her thumb, drawing blood. She let three drops fall into the runewell.

Seconds later, three hairless humanoids on back-bent legs with hideous, armed mouths climbed dripping and steaming out from the well. The wrathspawn fixed their glowing red eyes on the demon and the changeling.

“Uh, Eryu...what’s this?”

“Nula’s return has left you understandably shaken, but you’ve become so much more powerful since you last encountered her. It’s time for you to see that power for yourself.”

She snapped her fingers. The sinspawn charged.

Shinya reacted on instinct. They drew their katana, metal surging with magic, slicing out with a roar.

The first of the wrathspawn froze in their face. It fell in two vertically split pieces, its gooey innards crackling and burning from the lightning wrapped around Shinya’s blade.

Shinya took it all in with a breath but kept their senses honed on the two remaining hostiles. So this was how it was going to be. Their mouth curled into a small, tight-lipped smile. Easy.

#*#*#*#*

Ylja was off to a good start. She’d had breakfast and wasn’t tied down to a bed. But other than that, she was in the same boat as all the rest of the contestants on the game grounds.

For the first round, the White Witch Nazha had charged them with finding the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga herself, graciously provided them by Witch Queen Elvanna. They would receive points for getting to the Dancing Hut first and points for defeating its guardians.

With no idea where the hut could be, the huldra had simply been following a small river and keeping her eyes and ears open for anyone with a better idea. The river took her south toward cliffs that overlooked Glace Lake. A sturdy stone bridge spanned the river, its railings topped at either end by polished skulls on iron spikes.

The huldra froze in her tracks. This was so clearly a trap it was a mystery why the bridge had been decorated this way at all. Then a large, clammy hand closed around her ankle.

Ylja shrieked as she was dragged from the river’s edge into the freezing water. Her gilled, green-scaled attackers were merrows, nine-foot giants kin to ogres. Two of them held her under by the legs, simply waiting until her thrashing weakened and bubbles from her mouth lessened.

The third wrenched her strength-less arms behind her back, binding them with a rope of braided reeds. He hooked his large, muscular arms under her thighs and hefted her up from the icy waters. He locked his arms behind her head, forcing Ylja into an inescapable full-Nelson against his chest.

One of his fellow merrow took up a watch. The other ripped their captive’s underwear off from under her skirt. The two shared a leering grin.

The merrow behind Ylja thrust his giant cock up her tiny asshole. The huldra screamed, her legs kicking helplessly at the knee. The merrow before her seized her by the tits and slammed their dick up the fey’s little pussy.

Ylja’s scream choked to a sputtering gurgle as the massive merrow dicks stuffing her between the legs churned her guts to a pulsing pulp. They pistoned her walls apart, their long, thick girths rubbing against each other through her spasming flesh.

The huldra’s bound, pinioned body convulsed between the two giants raping her pussy and anus. Crushed from without and battered in the clenched gut from within, white hot blasts of rutted heat wracked her from toe to skull with rigid quivers.

The merrows inside her howled beneath the bridge. Thick gouts of seed exploded from their cocks into her squeezing pussy and anus. The two giants clutched each other by the arms as they crushed Ylja’s shafts between them, pumping her full to the brim.

They were so caught up in their own feral heat that neither noticed their guard’s lifeless splash into the languid river. Twin arrows charged through with magic pierced through the front merrow’s clenched spine. Their dilated eyes bulged.

Ylja’s vision swam in her half-open eyes, but she managed to focus on one familiar shape, dark hair and eyes against the snowy riverbank with a bow and arrow in hand. Shizu nocked two more arrows against the bow.

“Release the apprentice, or die.”

The merrow growled but pulled his massive dick from the huldra’s ass. He dropped her into the river.

Ylja landed with a splash. Through the rise and fall of the water above, she caught the dark line of two arrows above. The last merrow landed with a much larger splash behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, the twins just took their level up in magus


	32. Oviposition on the Beach

The forested island was quiet as the Flying Cloud approached. Two stone towers rose above the level of the surrounding trees along the top of the island’s central mountain ridge. A thin plume of smoke rose at the height of the ridge, midway between the towers.

It was nothing compared to the lightly smoking, honest-to-gods crater on the island’s northeastern slopes. It was hundreds of feet wide, surrounded by an even larger swath of burnt, flattened trees.

A couple members of the crew made the sign of Besmara’s crossbones over their chests. Captain Josey resisted a very powerful urge to do it themself. As soon as they got the gold off crimelord Zincher, they were sailing the fuck out of here.

The harbor, however, was as silent as the rest of the island. Josey docked their ship at the pier in the lightest state of disrepair, though it was still missing plenty of planks. The captain pointed their spyglass at the long-abandoned homes and warehouses ashore. Most had partially collapsed.

“Where the fuck is Zincher?” they muttered, snapping the spyglass shut.

“Perhaps Zincher was killed by the impact of, I don’t know, a falling star?” the snarked the half-elf tied to the railing, taking it in the ass from one of the less superstitious of the crew.

“Mates, gag these fools and get ‘em ready to walk.” In hindsight, they should’ve ordered those two gagged hours ago. 

Tsuto and Kuva were untied from the railing. The crew left the ropes binding their arms behind their backs untouched but added a hobbling rope to their ankles, so they could walk but couldn’t run.

Josey marched them down the gangplank and onto the pier between four crewmates. No one emerged to greet them, so they walked right into the midst of the dilapidated port.

Dark, oily blue blurred at the corners of the aquatic elf’s eyes. Josey turned, drawing their cutlass and dagger in the same motion. Their crewmates screamed.

Four hairless, leonine creatures with manes of a dozen of lashing tentacles ripped into their crewmates with fanged, eerily silent maws. Wham! A fifth pounced onto Josey’s back, four-hundred pounds of muscle knocking them flat.

“That was fortuitous,” Tsuto remarked over the screaming. He slipped his arms free of the ropes he’d worked loose on the way to the island.

Kuva gave a slow but affirmative nod as they slipped their arms free as well. Then a twenty-strong pack of the beasts stepped out from the shadows of the ruined warehouses.

“Back to the boat!” the half-elf declared.

The two turned and ran, the akatas snapping and lashing at their heels. Their luck ran out on the pier, their hobbled feet tripping over the warped planks. The first of the pursuing pack of akatas pounced on either of their exposed backs.

Tsuto and Kuva added their shrieks to the chaos. Even louder when the wearied, insufficient planks under them snapped and dropped them and the akatas into the surf.

Though Tsuto was certain this was how he died when he hit the water, the sudden disappearance of the beast’s weight on his back offered a glimmer of hope. He cracked an eye open to the burning saltwater.

The pack of akatas that’d broken off in pursuit were thrashing in the shallow waters, their rubbery bodies dissolving into oily blue sludge as though plunged into acid.

Tsuto broke the surface, spitting a mouthful of bitter seawater and thick, oily akata. Kuva broke the waters beside him. They shared a glance, then turned their heads back toward the shore.

The ten remaining akatas had fallen upon the five members of the Flying Cloud, two beasts to each aquatic elf. The creatures pinned them to the ground with their forepaws on their shoulders and hips. 

Each akata had sprouted two tentacular tails. The one shoved its tails up their elf’s mouth while the second shoved its up the elf’s ass, pussy, or both. The bodies of the mounted elves choked and writhed under the beasts, their limbs flailing helplessly in the gravelly sand.

Tsuto’s stomach roiled in queasy understanding. The akatas’ tails were pumping and squeezing thick, heavy eggs into the cavities of their hapless bitches. 

“Oh gods, I’m gonna be sick.”

Kuva swam away from him and toward the shore. They drew their longbow.

While it was true that no one deserved violent, raping oviposition by alien creatures, it was definitely too late for the sailors. Their bellies had already swollen as though pregnant from the sheer number of akata eggs implanted into the warm, fleshy nest of their guts.

Tsuto was sorely tempted to put them out of their misery as he added his arrows to Kuva’s. In the end, they simply wiped the beach clear of the aliens, leaving the elves passed out amidst the ruins. Unfortunately for all involved, the Flying Cloud had fled the island as soon as the attack had begun.

“We can’t stay here,” said Kuva, pointing out the abundantly obvious truth.

“If that Zincher could find a place to camp, so can we.”

“I have a bad feeling about the state of that camp.”

Honestly, so did Tsuto. But they might still be able to salvage something from the remains to keep them dry until the Shin Rakorath came knocking.

“Then it won’t count as stealing.”


	33. Into the Unknown

After their training on wrathspawn, Shinya returned to Kaijitsu Manor to wait for Alder. The shadows of the afternoon lengthened and the light began to fade and still there was no sign of the nobleman. With a seed of worry deep in their gut, Shinya saddled up their borrowed horse and rode out of town to Fox Manor on the Lost Coast.

The narrow path took the budding magus along the dark sea cliffs overlooking the Varisian Gulf. Wild sea birds let out their stark, grating cries over the ocean roaring and churning hundreds of feet below. Nettles and thorns grew more prominent, the trees bent and barren. The wind took on an even deeper chill as it whistled through the cliffside crags.

The path rose slowly, turning a steep corner. The unusually cold sea wind rose to a keening shriek as Fox Manor loomed into view at the western edge of the world.

The roof sagged, mold and mildew caking the crumbling walls like a thick coat of bubbling paint. The whole house was crooked, its gables angling sharply and breached in many places. Out front, the foundation stones of a long-burnt outbuilding and low well stood astride the weed-choked approach.

Shinya pulled their horse up short by the rusted gate. This...wasn’t a manor house. These were ruins. 

They’d known the entire Fox family, apart from Alder, had perished from disease, but they’d had no idea that the house had fallen with them. The idea of that handsome, charming young noble here was utterly unimaginable.

“Alder!” Shinya called out as loudly as they could.

There was no reply. With an uneasy grimace, they dismounted and made their way to the door. It creaked and shuddered open at the first bang of the rusty knocker. The damp, mold-tinged air within went straight for Shinya’s eyes, nose, and throat.

Coughing and tearing up, they stepped inside. The creak and strain of the house timbers gave the long, high-ceiling entrance hall a sense of impending age and decay. Pallid mold stained the floor, the walls, just as it ate into the grisly decorations on either side of a curving flight of stairs.

The walls were lined with heads: boar, bear, firepelt cougar, stag, and more. Their glassy eyes stared sightlessly from fur encrusted with mold and cobwebs. Yet all paled in comparison to the twelve-foot-long manticore on display in the center of the hall. The beast had the body of a lion, a scorpion’s tail fitted with dozens of razor barbs, huge bat-like wings, and an uncannily humanoid face.

“Alder?”

Silent seconds stretched into a minute. Shinya was more than happy to leave when they caught the sound of sobbing from somewhere upstairs.

“Fuck,” they squeaked under their breath. They couldn’t rightly leave Alder alone and crying in this gods-awful place. They swallowed over the lump in their throat and called up again. “Alder, just stay where you are. I’m coming up to get you and then we’re both getting out of here.”

Shinya took a deep gulp of frigid but fresh air from outside, then speedwalked to the staircase. As they reached the manticore, time slowed, a surge of heat erupting through the preserved corpse. The beast lurched into sudden un-life, its body bursting into enchanted flames.

The changeling screamed. The manticore’s razor-barbed tail whipped forward to poison and burn.

Shinya’s hands remembered their training even if their mind did not. Their katana slashed out from their sheath, slicing off the stinger.

It rolled to the floor, leaking sawdust and no longer aflame. The magus’ eyes flicked from the tip of the tail to the body.

All heat had vanished, leaving the hall even colder in its wake. The monster had settled back into its wired-together position as though it had never moved at all. Only now, sawdust poured from its ruined tail onto its back like the sands of an hourglass.

“Yeah, we are sooo out of here,” Shinya shuddered.

They ran up the stairs as fast as they dared with their katana in hand.

#*#*#*#*

The sky darkened fast in the northern hemisphere, which wasn’t a problem for either of the two witch apprentices per say, but neither did it help them locate this stupid Dancing Hut, which Shizu had resolved to attempt finding in the hopes of ending this round before they had to spend a night out in Irrisen’s eternal winter.

The changeling marched sullenly after the huldra, shivering under their borrowed furs. A sharp, corvid caw pierced the ever-chilling evening. The two stopped, Xuzu descending onto a snowy pine branch to make their report in guttural Abyssal.

Shizu pumped their fist into the air.

“What? What’d they say?” asked Ylja.

Right, she didn’t speak Abyssal. Good to know, although there was always a chance the fey’s witchmaster would teach her a comprehend languages spell later.

“Xuzu couldn’t find the Hut, but they did spot a maze-like forest that wasn’t in the area yesterday.”

Even Ylja had to agree that was suspect enough to investigate. They were hardly the only ones to reach the same conclusion. Jeering laughter, growls, and shrieked sobs sounded from a small clearing just before the snow-capped evergreens merged with the unnaturally dense thicket of thorn-wrapped trees and undergrowth.

Two ice trolls, ten-foot, nine-hundred-pound giants with blue-green fur and tusked jaws had captured a winter-touched fey apprentice. The blue-skinned faun had curled black horns and even curlier powder-blue hair and wool.

His captors had bound him on his stomach, his wrists tied to the trunk of the tree in front of him. His goat-like legs were splayed to either side, bound thigh-to-calf in a frogtie. They jerked and beat helplessly into the soiled snow as the trolls’ white-scaled, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound trollhound rammed its cock into the faun’s anus, its massive knot beating against his swollen asshole.

The hound dug its thick, black claws into the fey’s shoulders, drawing blood. With a vicious thrust, it forced its knot, wedged and burning into the tight squeeze of its bitch’s rawed anus.

The faun’s shriek choked off into a broken, eye-bulging sputter of air and saliva. Not only were the ruptured walls of his shaft stuffed beyond comprehension, but now the hound’s dick had shunted through his clenched guts, crushing his g-spot into the diaphragm of his lungs.

The fey’s back arched, his entire body bowing tight around the hound’s cock and knot impaling him. His eyes rolled to the back of his head. His dick, forced stiff in the snow, shot steaming cum onto his belly and the dirty white below.

The hound howled as its mounted bitch’s anal shaft wrapped even tighter around its cock and knot. The beast jackhammered into the faun’s ass, pounding the fey into the forest floor as its masters bent double with laughter above. Its feral seed exploded up his spasming anus. The fey cumbrain’s tongue lolled from his mouth.

So intent was the hound on seeding its bitch that it never noticed the heavy thuds of its masters hitting the snow behind it in deep, snoring slumber. The hound did not, however, miss the searing lances of pain as twin arrows ripped through its flesh.

The beast shrieked. It tore out its own knot from the tight, hot squeeze of the fey’s ass, spilling steaming blood and cum into the snow.

“Get the faun,” Shizu barked, aiming the next two arrows at the trollhound’s raging eyes.

“Trolls won’t stay dead without acid or fire you stupid cunt!” yelled Ylja, eyes wide in panic.

The hound roared and leapt. The two whistling projectiles slammed into its eye and throat. The beast was thrown to the ground with a high-pitched whine.

“Then get the faun and fucking run!”

Which was exactly what the two apprentices did, carrying the unconscious third with them into the woods.


	34. The Camp Toilet

Tsuto and Kuva followed the smoke plume until the skies grew dark. Even then, the elf was a decent enough ranger that they’d already marked its location and had no trouble leading them to what was, inevitably, Zincher’s camp. 

The half-elf suspected that Saul had mentioned this Clegg Zincher during his brief employment but simply could not recall anything about them. Not that it mattered. It seemed highly unlikely that anyone would try to set up the capital of their criminal empire on this dismal, rainy island.

A half-mile from the camp, the two spotted the first glow of an enormous bonfire through the forest and bone-chilling rain. Zincher’s team had created a clearing in the trees two hundred feet south of two rotting log houses smothered by reclaiming greenery. The felled trees had been used to create sections of high palisade walls, but the work had been left unfinished with the stack of logs visible through one of many gaps.

A single large tent loomed over the tree stumps and three lesser, olive-green tents. They were surrounded by the lines of narrow but deep trenches. Two grim-faced guards stood by the towering bonfire casting its light across the entire camp. Another four sat around the fire taking dinner.

Tsuto and Kuva watched and waited. They spotted two more guards patrolling the perimeter from inside the palisade and the trenches. These were not merely grim but haggard, their clothes, armor and equipment filthy with mud and other fluids.

“We can’t be too careful, but these people don’t seem to be Depra’s allies,” said Kuva in hushed Elven.

“Perhaps they were betrayed, abandoned to the blue wolves.”

“If they are not our enemies, we can’t steal from them.”

That put as much of a damper on things as this blasted rain. Tsuto, for one, was not going to stand around under Heavens’ icy piss.

“Very well, follow my lead.” He strode out from the trees and squeezed through the palisade gap into the open, waving and smiling. “Hello, over there! Sorry to bother you, but our ship has just had a run in with some rather nasty extraterrestrials.”

That certainly got their attention. The guards jumped, four of them to their feet. The two on duty ran over at once but kept a warhammer’s length between them and the half-elf, their eyes searching his body.

“The concern is flattering, but as you can see, I’m perfectly unharmed.”

“And your sea-faring companions?” The deep, authoritative voice sounded from out of the main tent. It belonged to a tall, broad-shouldered Mwangi with a thick beard shot through with gray. Obviously Zincher.

They were accompanied by a shorter but much broader dwarf. She or they held her warhammer over her shoulder as casually as an umbrella though her wispily bearded smirk was clearly unbothered by the downpour.

“They fell to the lion things, a tragedy, really.”

“What about the ship?” asked the dwarf, the rumble of earth in her voice.

“I take that back. Those who didn’t fall had to make a hasty Riddleport retreat.” A retreat implied a return, likely with reinforcements. It was less than a pipe dream, but hopefully enough for the crimelord to presume him worthy of being kept alive.

“I see. I’m Clegg Zincher and this is Akroi. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Tsavana, a pleasure.” They may not have met, but Zincher had heard of him and considered him enough of a threat to set that twink of a ship’s captain on him.

“What brings you Devil’s Elbow, Tsavana?” asked Akroi, rolling the name around in her mouth suspiciously.

Tsuto had to take Kuva’s refusal to join him out in the open as a charge to keep their purpose here a secret. Which meant lying, fast. He cleared his throat with a quick but poignant sigh.

“Money. I thought to inspect that fallen star, see if it were really made of wishes or something even more profitable. Sadly, my team was attacked as soon as we made land. It was all I could do to find you other living souls.”

Zincher gave a slow, solemn nod. “We had the same idea. Of the twenty strong who came with Akroi and I, you can see only these few remain. Those lions, the akatas, they poison their victims. Come, you must see for yourself, this fate that your companions will suffer.”

The Mwangi and the dwarf led him to the farthest off the three olive tents. There were two guards within, laid out on soiled cots. The graying bodies had been strapped down with thick belts. Their bellies were stretched and swollen, the movement of thick, slithering shapes visible through the skin.

“I really didn’t need to see this.”

“There’s more,” said Akroi, her smirk not only remaining plastered on her face but now lit with ghastly delight. She poked a body, a corpse with the butt of her warhammer.

Two sightless, milky white eyes popped open. The corpse thrashed to life, straining at its bonds. Tsuto sprang backward, right into Zincher’s solid chest.

The Mwangi grabbed him by the throat, yanking his feet off the ground. “You’re in our boat, now, Tsavana. You follow my command or you’ll learn how these zombies are made first hand.”

The half-elf nodded hastily, his arms clutching Zincher’s to keep from strangling all at once.

“Good. Your first task is lift my team’s spirits. That’ll earn you a meal and a cot but only for tonight, understand?”

He nodded. With his air continuing to expire in the crimelord’s iron grip there was nothing else he could do.

Akroi pried his arms off Zincher’s and wrenched them behind his back, letting him choke for real. She cuffed together in irons and shackled his instinctively kicking, jerking ankles to a hobbling chain.

Only then did the Mwangi drop him, letting Tsuto fall to his knees. Zincher unbuckled their belt and pulled the leather tight as a noose around the half-elf’s neck, continuing to choke him.

“I know who you are, Tsuto Honeycock Kaijitsu,” they growled, forcing a probing finger into his gasping mouth. “But this name, ‘Tsavana,’ it fits a cumbrain like you. This can be your name as our slave and toilet.”

With that, the crimelord gripped the sides of his head and rammed their cock into his mouth. Their dick slammed the back of Tsuto’s choked throat, the pain stabbing up into his rattled brain.

Behind him, Akroi straddled his knees and yanked down his pants. She dug her fingers into his asscheeks and spread them to either side. Then wedged her thick, dwarven dick up the half-elf’s tight, twitching asshole.

Akroi moaned at the new cumslut’s clenched grip around her cock, sucking her deeper with every thrust. She and her boss pounded their slave from both ends, wracking his slender body with violently shuddered pleasure between them. With every convulsion, his anus spasmed harder and urgent around the heavy girth of her dick.

The dwarf clutched at his hips for dear life and screamed as she railed her cumslut in the guts. Hot seed gushed from her dick, his anus sucking up every drop as though starving.

The Mwangi in his mouth groaned as well. Cum burst from the head of their cock down the half-strangled half-elf’s belted throat. As feral pleasure surged up from their released load, Zincher felt all their troubles and worries draining down the cum toilet’s quivering shaft.

They and their right-hand enforcer pulled out from Tsavana, letting him topple to his side on the floor. They watched in smirking satisfaction as their cum slopped from the toilet’s swollen mouth and asshole. 

Zincher gave Akroi a silent nod. The dwarf poked her head out of the alien-incubating tent.

“We got a live one,” she called out to the guards at the bonfire. “Time to get your desserts!”


	35. Raiders in the Dark

The trade caravan with which Ameko and Kela had hitched a ride had taken them three hundred miles from Sandpoint out of Varisia and into the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. They stopped at dusk to make camp at an ancient bridge that crossed the Thundering River where it joined the Rimeflow. This far north, the night was bitterly cold and frozen mist clung low to the ground, dimming the otherwise cheery light of the campfire.

Ameko, exhausted and famished from travel, wrapped her traveling blanket around her and squeezed into a seat around the fire between two of the warmest looking merchants. Rounded river stones crunched to a stop behind her.

“Cold, Ameko? I can think of a few ways to warm up,” the Ulfen barbarian whispered in her ear.

Her face flushed a deep red, which admittedly did help fend off the autumnal chill. On the one hand, there was no way they could get away with fucking at camp without one of merchants or drivers spotting them and telling everybody else. On the other hand, Kela was hot as all Hells.

Before Ameko could reply, the fog-dulled silence was broken by the scrape of wood upon the gravel bank. Kela tensed upright, drawing her longsword. The camp fell silent as the grave, everyone following her gaze beneath the bridge.

Movement in the darkness. Two boats had beached. Boots splashed in the shallows followed by oath-cries and battle-songs.

“Raiders!” she roared, pulling down her helm.

The camp erupted into a screaming panic, bodies falling to shots taken on the run. Ameko leapt to her feet, casting her blanket aside to reveal her rapier and dagger in either hand.

“Run!” she sang out, her voice booming through the muted night by bardic magic. “We’ll hold them off!”

Two lines of a dozen Ulfen raiders each descended upon the two defenders. The raging barbarian swept through their ranks like a demon bear, felling bodies with every swing of her sword.

Ameko’s rapier and dagger fared less well against their armor and shields in this damnable early darkness. A shield bashed into her wrist. She dropped her rapier with a yelp but immediately followed with a thrust of her dagger.

The short blade buried itself into the defending wood. It was yanked from her other hand as the raider turned. She was left defenseless as the next shield bashed into her head and the world went dark.

“Stand down or the girl dies!” a voice called out in Skald.

The red lifted from Kela’s vision just enough to recognize Ameko’s unconscious body in the hands of the raiders. She snarled at the dozen remaining raiders. They simply let the cold steel of an ax draw a thin line of blood from her slender throat.

The barbarian threw down her longsword and shield with a vicious roar. Then let the rage drain from her body. Exhaustion crashed into her with the force of a ten-foot wave. She staggered to her knees, her limbs leaden.

The surviving raiders, each sporting a gold arm-ring styled after a lion’s head biting its tail, broke into groups. Four gathered their dead into the small river knarrs. Four looted the the hastily deserted camp. Four secured their prisoners with coarse ropes and oars.

Kela’s wrists and neck were bound to the strong length of one oar while her ankles were spread and bound to a second. The cumbersome, heavy wood made walking a pain and made it impossible to rise on her own when they shoved her onto her back by the campfire.

The raiders stripped her helpless body of her armor, sellable, and ripped through her clothes, which were not. One hunkered down over her head, pinching her nose painfully shut to force her to open her mouth for breath. When she inevitably did, he laughed and thrust his filthy cock and balls into her mouth, stuffing and gagging her.

A second kneeled between her spread legs. They lifted her hips onto their knees, and pinned them there under their hands. The raider forced the full length of their dick up her cold-clenched asshole, impaling Kela to the hilt.

The barbarian didn’t have the air for a roar of outrage with the raider humping her head into the gravel. Instead, the sounds they raped out of her were weak, pathetic squeaks. 

The raiders laughed raucously, their pistoning cocks ripping her throat and anal walls apart. Their captive’s flesh, now covered in sweat, crunched against the gravel as they mercilessly pounded her. The head of one raping cock nailed their bound bitch in the g-spot.

Kela’s traitorous anus clamped tight around the rapist’s dick slamming burst after burst of wracking pleasure from her deepest cavity and spasming out into her back and oar-bound limbs. Her throat constricted around the gagging dick in sympathy as her heels and elbows scuffed and flailed uselessly against the gravel. The sound of her rapists’ jeering laughter faded to the relentless, urgent clench of her convulsing flesh.

Cum exploded into the orgasming slut’s throat and anus. The raiders groaned and kept their dicks pumping in the subjugated blonde’s spasming holes until they’d forced her full with every last drop.

They pulled out and let the next of their fellows descend on the whore’s cum-leaking body. The two glanced at the group gathered around the other, unconscious captive. They shared a sinister grin and joined the gathering.


	36. Portrait of a Lady

The erratic bouts of echoing sobs led Shinya through the ruined halls to what could only be the manor’s master bedroom. The once-fine chamber had been trashed ages ago. Beneath a thick, cloying coat of dust, the bed was smashed, its mattress torn apart. The walls had been gouged by blades, stuffed armchairs hacked apart, and the paintings on the walls torn to pieces...with one exception.

One canvas was untouched though it had been turned to face the wall. A vibrantly colored scarf, its reds and golds untouched by dust and time, was draped over the corner of its frame.

The sound of the sobbing had stopped. Indeed, the room was deathly quiet as Shinya swallowed around the lump in their throat and crept toward the dangling scarf. They reached out not with their hand but the tip of their blade.

Slish. The fabric slid harmlessly down the blunt edge of the katana, all the way to the hilt. Shinya lowered their sword and reached to remove the scarf.

The fabric coiled to life like a six-foot snake, throwing itself around the changeling’s throat. The katana clattered to the floor as Shinya clawed at the choking fabric with both hands.

Not a sob but a scream pierced the air, coming from the painting. The frame flipped around on its own. Out from the gruesome swirls of paint and blood, two claws of sharpened bone seized the frame.

The despoiled canvas bulged. But did not tear. The swirls of paint widened by some fell, necrotic magic. From their blackened vortex rose the twisted head of a woman’s shambling corpse.

The long-dead lady of the house, Alder’s mother herself, crawled out through the portrait, down the gouged wall, and onto the floor where the choking Shinya had fallen to their knees. 

Darkness swam at the corners of their vision. They released one hand from the scarf, fingers scrabbling for their sword. The strangling fabric squeezed even tighter, choking the last breath from their lungs.

Shinya pitched forward, their head and chest thudding against the floorboards. Skeletal feet scratched across the wood.

The revenant Lady Fox grabbed them from behind, pinning their arms across their chest like an unliving straitjacket. A grisly, bony cock tore through the changeling’s pants and punched through the fear-clenched mouth of their anus.

Shinya hadn’t the breath to shriek at the raw pain spearing them through from ass to mouth. Instead, saliva splattered from their gasping mouth into the dust.

The revenant slammed her cock up their anus, splitting their walls apart. The magus’ pinioned body twitched and jerked between Lady Fox and the scarf pinning them by the neck to the floor. The boards creaked under them as the undead’s cock battered their guts to a raw, spasming pulp.

She crushed her captive to her skeletal chest. Her head rammed their g-spot.

Drool pooled from Shinya’s mouth as they were sucked into total darkness. Their pinioned body wracked with uncontrollable convulsion. Freezing, necrotic seed burst up their anus, ripping loose the final tatters of their consciousness.

The revenant couldn’t have cared less as she raped the still-quivering heap of warm flesh beneath her, her bony cock railing their ass until she’d fed them every last drop of her wretched cum.


	37. Triumph of the Fey

Shizu, Ylja, and the unconscious faun between them ran through twist and bend in the labyrinthine wood. The path they’d chosen in haste and necessity eventually widened to a clearing with a silvery pool at its center. On the pool’s surface, ripples began at its outermost edges and closed inward to a single point, where drops of water fell up toward the sky. The entire pool rained skyward while snowflakes drifted down between the droplets.

“What the…?”

A brisk wind rustled the trees. Out from between the frosted branches stepped the pool’s two guardians. The eyes of the first fey burned with every color of flame, her crown of locks flickering torch-like around her head. The dawn piper cradled the eldritch pipe of her soul in long, slender fingers.

The second guardian was far more bestial, flecks of saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth. His large, pointed ears twitched at the slightest sound. Though the spriggan began at the size of a gnome, he grew with every step until his giant, hulking frame could match that of any ogre or troll.

The changeling and the huldra dropped their fellow apprentice like a hot potato...for his safety and theirs.

The dawn piper grinned, her white teeth aglow in the blackening dusk. A thirty-foot blaze of blinding radiance burst from her beauteous form.

Shizu and Ylja yelled in shock and pain. Blood leaked like tears from the apprentices’ eyes.

The spriggan’s giant morningstar slammed into the changeling’s gut. Shizu doubled over, wheezing and sputtering blood.

They flailed one hand in the direction where they guessed the spriggan now stood. The ring of the ram glowed on their finger. A transparent force in the shape of a ten-foot ram rocketed out from their ring and uselessly over the fey’s shoulder.

The dawn piper laughed in the heat of battle so decidedly in their favor. She piped a quick, jaunty tune on her pipe.

The pool’s silvery water surged up and out into a ten-foot-diameter sphere. Her tune sent it rolling into the huldra, engulfing her in its aqueous embrace.

As the spriggan beat the changeling into submission on forest’s snow-blanketed floor, the dawn piper played a new, undulating tune. Three thick tentacles of water snaked to life within her aqueous orb. They plunged through Ylja’s choking lips, through her fear-clenched slit, and up her equally constricted asshole.

Engulfed by the water, its cold, heavy pressure prevented her head, trunk, and limbs from moving even an inch as the water tentacles tore the walls of her throat, pussy, and anus apart. They beat and fucked the immobilized, drowning fey from the inside out, churning her guts into a rawed pulp of nerves.

Her lungs ached to explode in agony, but it was her stuffed throat, ass, and cunt that exploded first. As the three, thick tentacles pounded Ylja into the unyielding grip of the fey’s aqueous orb, tormented pleasure convulsed out and inward from her clamped, squeezing shafts. Her utterly immobile body wracked unbearably, inescapably in shuddering rapture.

The dawn piper’s fingers continued their merciless dance. The huldra’s consciousness was raped from her skull, the tentacles railing her into watery oblivion. Only then did the fey cease her merry music, letting Ylja collapse in a puddle of slush. She whistled at the spriggan.

His head snapped toward her over the body of the witch under him. He had their arms pulled back in either of his hands, their skirt pulled up over their hips. He stayed in his squat, ramming his enlarged cock up the impossibly tight, sucking squeeze of his new cumdump’s tiny anus. The witch was so mercilessly stuffed on his cock that his head bulged in their belly, each gut-pounding slam causing their lolling head to bounce limply on their slender neck.

“Bind them, the faun, too,” she crowed at him in Sylvan. Food always tasted better if you played with it first.


	38. Return of the Nobles

That night, Shinya woke in a state of extreme disorientation. It didn’t help that they were completely naked and restrained spread-eagle to the wall by thick, slimy and furry bands of a tuberous black fungus. Its spicy, sickly sweet reek roiled the changeling’s and induced a fit of eye-watering hacking.

Dark green mold and dripping fungi spread out from the large patch that bound Shinya across the damp brick walls of this basement. A water-damaged table sat at its center, cluttered with all manner of garbage: empty bottles, bits of clothing, crumpled papers. A painting leaned against the far side of the table, facing a large leather chair. The chair’s high back and cushion were horribly stained by smears of rotten meat and its arms were sticky with blood. 

A smaller table sat against the wall opposite the Tian. Its surface was heaped with silver platters, fine porcelain plates, and crystalware. The “food” on these plates and platters, however, was rotten meat chock full of wriggling maggots. Thick, putrid blood gelled in the crystal goblets.

“Help!” Shinya yelled only to break down into another fit of coughing. Their head perked up at once at the sound of a trapdoor opening from above. Two pairs of feet descended the stairs.

“Forgive our tardiness,” Alder called down, his handsome face bathed in the warm light of a torch. “It took me forever to find Father.”

Shinya blinked through their curtain of blurry tears. No amount of heat could shake that icy chill curdling the blood in their veins.

The thing beside Alder was fatherly figure but a dread ghast, decayed and rotting flesh clings tightly to his bones, his eyes burn with an unholy, necromantic light. Father Fox’s teeth had grown long and pointed in undeath, his hands twisted into wicked claws.

“Shinya, meet His Lordship Vorel Fox. Father, heir apparent Shinya Kaijitsu.”

A long, dry tongue lolled from the His Lordship’s mouth. It rasped as he dragged it along his fangs, setting the Tian’s teeth on edge.

“Alder, what-what the Hells is going on?” they squeaked out between coughs, their limbs straining in primal fear against the thick, impossibly strong bands of fungus around their wrists and ankles.

The living noble’s mouth spread in a patronizing smile. “Oh my dear, simple Shinya. You know, I think we could’ve been great friends...if I hadn’t met your devilish rake of a brother first.”

“Ts-Tsuto?!”

“That’s the one, yes. While I was away at university in Magnimar our paths crossed rather fatefully. Turned out he was part of a band called the Skinsaws and under the thumb of a very domineering aasimar.”

“N-Nula?!”

Alder blinked in surprise himself. “Well aren’t you a country mouse with connections. Nula, indeed. And I must say, she has her price, but she certainly gets her results.”

He threw a thumb over his shoulder at the dread ghast hunched and looming at his side.

“S-son?!”

“Son…?” His face shifted from a quizzical stare to one of wide-eyed, gap-jawed understanding. “Manifold tits of Lamashtu! You’re the poor fool that knocked her up, aren’t you?”

“No! Never! She stole my seed!”

“Ha! I suppose that’s why she asked Father and I to deal with you. His Lordship’s work is so terribly messy, however. I can’t bear to stick around in this nauseating dump to be splattered with whatever else you’re keeping inside of you.”

“Alder, no, please!”

The noble reached forward. Shinya flinched, but the back of his hand only touched their face in the gentlest caress.

“The city calls, Country Mouse. I bid you and Father adieu and goodnight.”

With that, Alder turned and traipsed lightly back up the stairs. While his father lunged. Shinya screamed.

Vorel’s claws seized the Tian’s naked shoulders, his fangs latching into their slender neck. His tongue, dry and abrasive as a feline’s, licked and teased Shinya’s skin until the fine hairs stood on the back of their neck and the twink’s body shivered and squirmed between the hard, rotted muscle of the ghast and the equally unyielding brick of the wall behind them.

A helpless gasp and whimper escaped their lips. With Lord Vorel’s dry body rubbing and pressing against Shinya’s wholly exposed chest, belly, and crotch, their cock was forced stiff despite their fear.

The ghast laughed, his latched fangs sinking deep enough to draw blood from his captive’s tensed, straining neck. Shinya half-cried, half-moaned, hands clenching into helpless fists over their constricted wrists. Then Lord Vorel jumped up onto their cock.

The twink squealed, their dick suddenly sucked into their undead rapist’s dry, clenched asshole all the way to the balls. Bracing against their shoulders, claws drawing blood as blood, the older nobleman slammed his hips into Shinya’s, pounding them against the wall as surely as he impaled himself on his captive’s dick. Lord Vorel’s anal walls clamped and convulsed around the twink’s throbbing cock.

Shinya’s eyes squeezed shut. The ghast’s anus squeezed harder. It sucked the cum right out of their dick.

The changeling, moaning and sobbing, unloaded their raped-out cum into Lord Vorel’s undead anus. His Lordship howled with laughter. He bucked wild and rode his tasty prey until his asshole had squeezed out every last drop of seed.


	39. The Oni Plants a Bitter Seed

In the middle of the night, one more shadow joined the flickering darkness of the camp fallen to the Ulfen raiders. Yamaro, a Tian-Min clad head-to-foot in the fitted black garb of the Frozen Shadows, had to step into the light to make his or their presence known.

The raiders jumped but lowered their blades. They’d been expecting the ninja.

Yamaro set down a suitcase made special for just this occasion. It was just big enough to hold a small, slight body huddled in a ball. There was a hole at one end from the head to protrude. The small hole at the opposite was for his master’s pleasure alone. So he had to raise a quizzical brow when the raiders procured two limp, utterly spent bodies from their midst.

“Master Kidatsu’s interest is in the Tian-Min only,” he said in slightly accented Skald.

“What’re we supposed to do with the blonde, then?”

The ninja gave an apathetic shrug. “I leave that to your endless imaginations.”

The twelve Ulfens grinned and whooped, converging upon the hollow-eyed woman to ply said imaginations with her unresisting form. Yamaro, meanwhile, packed his suitcase. The naked, soiled package never raised her drooping head, letting her sweat-slicked locks conceal the humiliation of her cum-, piss-, and dirt-splattered face. The raiders’ seed still leaked from her swollen, well-raped holes, oozing onto the opposite end of the suitcase.

The ninja shook his head. This cumbrained public toilet wished to challenge the onis of the Five Storms for the Jade Throne of Minkai? He might’ve laughed if he were one given to laughter. Instead, he vanished back into the freezing night, leaving the raiders to ram their cocks into every helpless hole of the broken blonde.

Yamaro reached the Frozen Shadows’ stronghold at dawn. The hills ascended sharply into a steep, craggy shale escarpment. Tucked into a narrow defile between two of the crags was a stone-and-timber longhall and tower, both weathered and gray. 

The hall, rechristened as Karasugake by Master Kidatsu, perched over one hundred feet above the base of the cliff. Only a single wooden stair climbed to its front gate up a series of switchbacks along the sheer cliff. All was silent in the gray, misted dawn save for the echoing caws of the ravens who nested atop the hall’s tower and ridgepole.

Yamaro picked up his pace, racing the rising sun to the top of the stairs. Fingers of pink light had just breached the horizon as he slipped soundlessly through the longhall’s massive double doors.

Rows of pillars supported the forty-foot-high roof, torches in the pillar sconces and two fire pits in the center of the rush-strewn floor giving the vast room a ruddy, homey glow. Several doors opened into rooms on either side beneath ten-foot-high balconies lined with Ulfen feasting tables. At the far end of the hall, a fifteen-foot-high balcony with the master’s high table looked out over all. 

Yamaro set the suitcase beneath the master’s balcony. He dropped to a one-knee bow beside it.

A formless shadow leaped from the balcony. The darkness that touched down upon the floorboards below shifted in smoke into black-clad feet. As the being took humanoid shape, it grew upward and outward into the broad, twelve-foot form of a horned and tusked oni.

“Yamaro.” Even at their lowest volume, Master Kidatsu’s deep, rasping voice sent quakes into the human’s breastbone. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, Master.”

The oni’s wide mouth curled into a fanged smirk. They picked up the girl-stuffed suitcase by the handle, needing only one hand to do so. They raised the package until her bowed head was level with their burning eyes.

“This is the would-be empress of Minkai? This worthless cumdump stinking of her customers’ cum and piss?” Master Kidatsu laughed, shaking ravens off the rooft’s ridgepole. “You have only one use left in this world, you cumbrained piece of shit.”

The oni removed the black sash from around their waist to reveal two flaccid cocks, each longer and thicker than those of a horse at rest. They reached through the curtains of the Tian-Min’s hair and pinched her nose, forcing her mouth open. Master Kidatsu shoved her lips mercilessly down to the base of both cocks, choking the full length of her helpless throat with their twin girths.

The Tian gagged and drooled onto the oni’s balls, the choking spasms of their throat sucking and squeezing their dicks to even more massively wedging proportions in their over-stuffed shaft. Just before she could pass out from lack of air, Master Kidatsu pulled her defeated head off their dicks and turned the suitcase around to the other side.

They set the heads of their oversized cocks against the fear-clenched mouths of her pussy and asshole. The oni took hold of the suitcase in both hands. They screwed her down over their fully engorged cocks like the undersized, vise-tight fleshlight she’d become.

The girl screamed, eyes bulging wild, neck straining in its hole as the twin, elephantine dicks split her ass and pussy apart from mouth to base. The giant oni pistoned into her trapped, sealed flesh. The heads of their cocks slammed into her guts, bashing her slender shoulders against the wall of the suitcase. They pounded her balled body into a rawed pulp of pulsing meat beneath her shrieking skull.

It was too much for the mercilessly contained, living fleshlight. Spears of white hot feeling exploded out from her over-stuffed pussy and anus. Her screams strangled off to a high-pitched, nasal squeal as her ravaged body was wracked from the tips of her curled toes to the top of her skull with mind-blanking orgasm.

The rawed, pulped mass of her flesh squeezed and convulsed around Master Kidatsu’s jackhammering cocks. The broken, cumbrained slut was sucking them deeper into their pussy and anus with each shamefully pleasured spasm. She squealed like dying, spitted sow.

With a deep, guttural groan, the oni released the full flood of their cum. They pumped their living fleshlight full to the brim with their accursed, burning seed. The girl’s stomach swelled, crushing her further against the walls of the suitcase as it seeded her womb with its fell magic.

“Yamaro, bring the plugs,” the oni grunted.

It was the best way to ensure her pregnancy. Since this worthless human sow carried the blood inheritance to the Jade Throne, so would any child she bore. Who better to challenge the Five Storms than the oni-blooded child of the exiled Master Kidatsu themself?


End file.
